Cyclocross is a one of those weird sports I’d never heard of until I moved to Portland. Essentially cyclocross is a form of bike racing that entails riding on pavement, trails and grass while occasionally dismounting to carrying your bike over obstacles. Surprisingly cyclocross complements another Portland oddity, the huge number of unimproved roadways in the city. These unpaved roads are great for cyclocross training!
For the past two years, I have presented a GIS/mapping workshop as part of Paideia — in 60-ish minutes, aiming to give the Reed community an introduction into the concepts of spatial analysis, basic cartography and critical map reading, and how they might start approaching analytical and/or spatial projects of their own.
This year I decided to split this into two sessions — one focused on GIS as a tool, another focused more on mapmaking and less on data and/or analysis. Continue reading “Curricular guidance from social media: #gistribe in action”
Fall break is here, and I expect Portland fall weather to set in any minute now. In anticipation of hunker-down-and-curl-up weather, here’s a handful of geospatial delights that might pair well with a hot mug of something and grey skies: open source geodata in action, some great work from colleagues in Seattle, and a beautiful compilation of imagery of the Oregon coast. Continue reading “A few of my favorite (mapping) things”
On May 29th/30th, Reed is co-hosting the inaugural instructional technology conference of the Northwest Five Consortium (NW5C). I am leading a workshop on maps, mapping, spatial analysis, and spatial thinking; materials below.
Additional links:
Recently, I have been assisting several students with geocoding projects for their classes and thesis projects, using geocoding functionality in R. To document this work I have put together several tutorials and resources for students and faculty to use.
Continue reading “Geocoding”
I’ll be leading a one-hour intro to GIS, mapping, and geospatial analysis on Friday, 1/22, from 9-10 in ETC 205. Come join!
Materials from the workshop are here (Mapping_GIS_Paideia). Download the zipped file to your desktop and unzip it – open datafiles in either ArcGIS or qGIS (cross-platform and open source).
I recently returned from a week of workshops, presentations, networking, and general nerdery with an incredible group of people: open source geospatial developers, users, and other spatially-focused folk from across the globe.
Continue reading “FOSS4G: Geospatial tech, community, and a bird named Helen”
Last year, Reed re-examined its smoking policy, which touched off some fairly spirited debates around campus. The revised policy is now in place, and you can see structures around campus to provide simultaneous shelter from the rain and access to ashtrays. (Catch up on what you missed here, thanks to the Reed Quest.)
One of the interesting things about this discussion is that it centered around a key spatial theme: proximity.
Continue reading “Spatial proximity and Reed’s smoking policy”
While proud families and supportive friends watched the Reed College Class of 2014 officially transition to alumni, I headed to Pasadena for the 2014 UCGIS* conference. As folks chatted at pre-conference workshops** and the opening reception, I slowly realized that Reed was the lone liberal arts college in attendance. The conference was the big schools, the big names, and … me. Continue reading “The future of GIS in education and research (UCGIS, 2014)”
The more I work with all-things-spatial, the more I want to infuse this sort of work across campus — maps as data visualizations, spatial context as framing for questions and answers, spatial patterns as answers and questions.
Continue reading “Workshop: Getting IN the map”
