CENTER FOR GEOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS NEWSLETTER
February 2012
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HIGHLIGHTS
• Harvard Geography Colloquium: Monday, March 5th
• CGA’s Lex Berman Wins 2012 Dean’s Distinction Award
• Weekly workspace: WorldMap Collaborative
• Davis Center Prize for GIS Projects in Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies
• 2012 CGA Conference: Re-mapping Africa in GIS: From Humanities to Health
• 2012 Fisher Prize for Excellence in GIS
• AAG 2012: Working Digitally With Historical Maps, presentations now available online
• 2012 GeoNode Summit hosted by CGA
• Harvard Geospatial Library Open Geoportal Release
• Symposium on Digital Humanities to Feature GIS
• GIS Programmer position at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University
. Visualizing Demographic Change in New Way
• ESRI on Open Source
• Mapgeo Platform
• More…
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CGA NEWS
Harvard Geography Colloquium: Monday, March 5th
The next Harvard Geography Colloquium meeting will take place Monday, March 5, 2012, from 12:15 – 1:30 in Room K050 of the CGIS Knafel Building at 1737 Cambridge St. Timothy Wallace from the University of Wisconsin, and Andrew Woodruff from Axis Maps will present “On Bostonography”. Lunch will be served. For more on the Colloquium and to see past events:
http://gis.harvard.edu/colloquium
CGA’s Lex Berman Wins 2012 Dean’s Distinction Award
Congratulations to our own Lex Berman on receiving the Dean’s Distinction Award for service to FAS.
Weekly workspace: WorldMap Collaborative
The CGA is pleased to introduce the WorldMap Collaborative, a weekly work space for faculty, students and staff addressing individual research projects involving GIS and WorldMap more generally. Attendees can work on their individual projects in a collaborative setting with others addressing various aspects of WorldMap and GIS technology. Students and faculty from all Harvard schools are welcome. WorldMap Collaborative organizers are Suzanne Blier and Jeff Howry.
Davis Center Prize for GIS Projects in Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies
Beginning in spring 2012 to support innovative applications of technology in advancing regional studies, the Davis Center will award a prize for the best geographic information systems (GIS) project relevant to Russian, East European, and Central Asian studies. The best submission by a Harvard student and the best submission by a Harvard faculty member will each receive an award of $500. This prize is offered in conjunction with the Howard T. Fisher Prize for Excellence in Geographic Information Science to be held during the annual CGA Conference, which will take place at Harvard University March 29–30, 2012. For details and to apply for the prize:
http://daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu/news_events/2012gis.html
2012 CGA Conference: Re-mapping Africa in GIS: From Humanities to Health
This two-day conference, to be held on March 29-30, 2012, brings together scholars on GIS and Africa to share their knowledge and experiences; to explore the potential of geospatial methods in the social sciences, further humanities scholarship by critically engaging GIS methods, and promote interdisciplinary collaborative research in health and humanities in the continent of Africa.
Call for posters: http://hvrd.me/zuP3WQ
View details and register: http://bit.ly/giEEg5
2012 Fisher Prize for Excellence in GIS
The competition for the Howard T. Fisher Prize for Excellence in GIS offers an opportunity to Harvard students, including both undergraduates and graduates in good standing, to submit their work in geographic information science and be considered for a Prize of $500 in each of the designated categories for that academic year. The prize is open to any student whose primary enrollment is in a school at Harvard University during either semester of that school year. The Prize submission, review, and selection process will be held in conjunction with the CGA’s Spring conference: “Re-Mapping Africa: From Humanities to Health”. More on the Fisher Prize:
A one page Fisher Prize Flier:
More on the CGA Spring Conference:
http://bit.ly/giEEg5
AAG 2012: Working Digitally With Historical Maps, presentations now available online
As part of the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting in New York City, a full day of five sessions on the topic of Digital Historical Maps and Digital Gazetteers was held at the New York Public Library. Presentations (including one by Lex Berman of CGA), program schedule, and related resources now available here:
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~chgis/gazetteer/aag_2012.html
2012 GeoNode SummitThe Center for Geographic Analysis provided meeting space for this year’s GeoNode developer summit February 6-10. Participants included the organizers OpenGeo, and groups including CGA involved in building on GeoNode to support various agendas. These groups include: WorldBank GFDRR, SpatialDev / NASA SERVIR, ITHACA / World Food Program, MapStory, Spatial Marketplace, Eldarion, and the Boston Metropolitan Planning Council.
WorldMap Update
Satellite imagery has been added as an option in WorldMap WARP, so now one can georeference scanned maps to places where roads are not available.
CGA has also made progress on an initial change-over-time visualization capability for large mapping datasets that could eventually be integrated into WorldMap. If such a tool is of interest to you please let us know. We are looking for groups who have the need as well as resources to contribute to make this a reality.
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HARVARD GIS COMMUNITY NEWS
Harvard Geospatial Library Open Geoportal Release
The Harvard Library has released the latest version of the Harvard Geospatial Library (http://hgl.harvard.edu), which provides significant improvements over previous versions. This release of the system implements OpenGeoportal (http://opengeoportal.org), a collaboratively-developed web portal that enables geospatial data search, discovery, display, and delivery. OGP was founded at Tufts University and is the result of a multi-year collaboration with the Harvard Library and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries to create a system of interoperable geospatial data repositories based on shared metadata and open source software. Read the full announcement here: http://goo.gl/Fwlnp
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CONFERENCES AND EVENTS
Symposium on Digital Humanities to Feature GIS
Harvard-Ritsumeikan Symposium on Digital Humanities to be held March 3 in CGIS South S020 (Belfer Case Study Room) on March 3.
Registration deadline is Wednesday, February 29 rijs@fas.harvard.edu. Free and Open to the Public.
NEURISA Ignite Spatial Vermont Event
The New England Chapter of the Urban & Regional Information Systems Association (NEURISA) and Vermont Center for Geographic Information are coordinating another NEURISA Ignite Spatial event in Vermont. The event will be held on Tuesday, April 17 (7-9 PM) at the Capitol Plaza Hotel in Montpelier, VT. This event will feature five minute talks with an open format. University students and GIS professionals will be speaking. To register for the event:
http://www.neurisa.org/IgniteVT2012abstract
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NEWS ON GIS RESEARCH AND SERVICES
Visualizing Demographic Change in New Ways
This application developed by the Center for Urban Research employs several novel techniques to allow users to explore socio-demographic data on New York City.
http://www.urbanresearchmaps.org/comparinator/pluralitymap.htm
Innovative Approach to Displaying Temporal Information
This application uses the Leaflet Javascript library for efficiently rendering change over time with large datasets.
Microsoft Patents ‘Unsafe Neighborhood’ Avoidance Feature
http://www.gpsmagazine.com/2012/01/microsoft_patents_unsafe_neigh.php
GIS Programmer position at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University
The Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University is developing a mobile application that will serve a range of relevant spatial and biological data for plants in the living collection, and act as a platform for citizen science observations.
Online Textbook on Geostatistical Analysis
http://spatial-analyst.net/book/sites/default/files/Hengl_2009_GEOSTATe2c1w.pdf
ESRI on Open Source
ESRI talks about their approach toward open source software.
http://www.esri.com/news/arcuser/0112/open-source-closed-source.html
Mapgeo
A web platform using html5, and cloud hosted tile based caching. This example is for the Town of Nantucket:
http://www.mapgeo.com/nantucketma/
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Editors of this issue are Jeff Blossom and Ben Lewis
The CGA Newsletter is published monthly.
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