CENTER FOR GEOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS NEWSLETTER February 2013
HIGHLIGHTS
Updated Dates for June GIS Institute
WorldMap Update
TweetMap
ESRI SpatiaLABS Available
ABCD and Colloquium March Presentations
Call for Visualizations: Fisher Prize in GIS
CGA Spring Conference
Asiapop and Landscan 2011 Population Data
Free E-Book: “Future U.S. Workforce for Geospatial Intelligence”
Longitude Lunar Method and Cook’s First Voyage
City of Boston Data
More….
CGA NEWS
Updated Dates for June GIS Institute
The CGA has recently updated several important dates regarding the GIS Institute to be held in June, 2013:
Application Deadline: Friday, March 22, 2013 @ 11:59 pm (Late applications can join the waitlist.)
Notification of acceptance: Friday, April 5, 2013
$100 Registration fee due: Friday, April 19, 2013
Deadline for meeting with instructors to finalize project/data: Friday, May 10, 2013
Institute begins: Tuesday, June 4, 2013
Final project presentation: Friday, June 14, 2013
Read more details and apply to the Institute online.
WorldMap Update
WorldMap Version 1.2 has been released and supports new features and under-the-hood improvements. Users can now:
Comment and rank maps and layers
Create layers of images or videos by filtering Picasa and YouTube feeds
Place annotations on maps using a “Notes” tool
Improvements have been made to the display of Harvard Geospatial Library maps in WorldMap
and to overall system performance.
We are currently working on a mobile client, and some other features for the next release.
In the past year more than 6,000 public data layers have been uploaded to, or created using WorldMap. These layers total more than a terabyte of data, most of which is not available elsewhere online.
TweetMap
The CGA has been collaborating with Todd Mostak (former Kennedy School fellow, now MIT researcher) on a fast mapping platform called MapD for visualizing large spatio-temporal datasets such as global tweets. A demo of MapD integrated with WorldMap called “TweetMap Alpha” is available here and currently provides query and display access to 95 million tweets. Also, Directions Magazine
wrote an article on TweetMap.
In related work, the CGA and Todd Mostak are completing work on a project with the Harvard Reischauer Institute and metaLAB @ Harvard to use the above mentioned MapD platform to speed map display performance on The Digital Archive of Japan’s 2011 Disasters application. Ben Lewis of CGA gave a talk on CGA’s work over the past year to support map development of this application. The venue was a conference hosted by the Harvard Reischauer Institute entitled Opportunities and Challenges of Participatory Digital Archives.
ESRI SpatiaLABS Available
The CGA recently purchased the ESRI SpatiaLABs instructional GIS package. These are stand-alone computer lab activities that introduce, develop, and reinforce spatial reasoning and analysis skills through the use of ESRI GIS technology. More information here. The SpatiaLABs instruction and data are available on the T drive at the HMDC computer lab in Cambridge, or by contacting CGA.
CGA’s monthly GIS presentations – come join the discussion in March (free lunch)
Geography Colloquium @ CGA To be announced soon to this newsletter list.
GIS Presentation Series (ABCD-GIS) “Wind Map and Other Visualizations: http://hint.fm “ by Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, lead technologists of Google’s “Big Picture” visualization group. March 20, 2013. Noon – 1:30 in Room K354 of the CGIS North building at 1730 Cambridge St.
Call for Visualizations: Fisher Prize in GIS
The CGA is inviting “geographic visualization” submissions for our annual spring conference. These submissions may be in poster, video, 3d model, interactive website, or another format that can be set up in exhibit space. Submissions by Harvard students will also be considered for the Fisher Prize competition for excellence in GIS. The deadline for submission is Friday, April 26. Learn more on our Fisher Prize pages.
Tweets containing the word “snow” in the Northeast U.S. for 2013 as displayed by TweetMap.
CGA Spring Conference:
“Creating the Policy and Legal Framework for a Location–Enabled Society”
Thursday and Friday, May 2-3, 2013
CGIS Tsai Auditorium, 1730 Cambridge St. Cambridge MA
Read more and register on our conference page. http://gis.harvard.edu/conference
ENVI 5.0 Service Pack 2 Available
This is available for Harvard ENVI users at our software download site. After logging in at this site, see the “ENVI and IDL software” topic to download.
CONFERENCES, CALLS, EVENTS & EMPLOYMENT
ESRI Student Internship Program
Geospatial Grid Contest
See more details on these calls on our Calls and Public Events page.
NEWS ON GIS RESEARCH AND SERVICES
Meteorite Maps:
Heatmap of Every Meteorite Impact (image at right)
U.S. Map by Rock Type
Locations of Meteorite Craters
Asiapop – Free High Resolution Population Data for Asia
Landscan 2011 Data Available
LANDSAT 8 Satellite Launched
Social Media as Passive Polling: Prospects for Development & Disaster Response
Free E-Book: “Future U.S. Workforce for Geospatial Intelligence”
Why Map Portals Don’t Work article / blog
Longitude Lunar Method and Cook’s First Voyage - A video by the Fall 2012 Conant Prize winner.
Mapping the Kumbh Mela Megacity
Live Severe Weather Map
Harvard University Center for Geographic Analysis Newsletter February, 2013
CGA featured in “Online tools decentralizing disaster relief efforts” article
GIS Self Learning Tool by The University of Melbourne
City of Boston Data
Bost.ocks.org – Geographic and other visualizations by Mike Bostok
Editor of this issue is Jeff Blossom.
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