November 2012

CENTER FOR GEOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS NEWSLETTER

November 2012

 

HIGHLIGHTS

  • CGA Spring Conference
  • GIS Day Presentation Videos
  • Esri ArcGIS 10.1 Service Pack 1 Released
  • GSD Exhibition: “Cartographic Grounds“
  • Final two-hour GIS workshops for this semester
  • GIS for Humanists Workshop on December 6th
  • Students:  use this semester’s work in the Fisher Prize competition

 

CGA NEWS

 

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

Location matters. Energy, sustainable agriculture, biodiversity, natural hazards, traffic and transportation, crime and political instability, water quality and availability, climate change, migration and urbanization – all key issues of the 21st century – have a location component. Critical geographic thinking, understanding and reasoning are essential skills for modern societies, and geospatial technologies for location based data collection, management, analysis and visualization have developed rapidly in recent decades. Today, these technologies are widely applied in routine operations in large corporations, entrepreneurial businesses, government agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the social media of our daily lives. They save cost, improve efficiency, increase transparency, enhance communication, and help solve problems. Location-enabled devices are weaving “smart grids” and building “smart cities;” they allow people to discover a friend in a shopping mall, catch a bus at its next stop, check surrounding air quality while walking down a street, or avoid a rain storm on a tourist route – now or in the near future. And increasingly they allow those who provide services to track, whether we are walking past stores on the street or seeking help in a natural disaster.

Read more and register on our conference page. http://gis.harvard.edu/conference

 

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. Harvard students can participate in the Fisher Prize competition for excellence in GIS. The deadline is not until Friday, April 26 so this is a reminder to use this semester’s coursework for your submission. Learn more on our Fisher Prize pages.

 

Esri ArcGIS 10.1 Service Pack 1 (SP1) Released:

Esri is pleased to announce that ArcGIS 10.1 Service Pack 1 (English only) is now available to download. This service pack provides maintenance fixes, performance improvements, software enhancements, and translation updates; all of which will improve the quality of your ArcGIS system. We recommend that you download and install this service pack at your earliest convenience. See details on what’s included.

Harvard Geography Colloquium

December’s Geography Colloquium will be held on Wednesday, December 5 @ 12 noon to 1:30 PM in the CGIS South building, room S050. Jie Tian, Assistant Professor in GIS at Clark University, will speak about “Modeling the Environment Using Modern Geospatial Approaches”. Learn about our Geography Colloquium series.

 

ABCD-GIS Presentation

On December 19 CGA research fellow Toshi Seto will present “The Role of the Neogeography for Geospatial Information Sharing: the Case Studies of the Crisis Mapping Project and the FOSS4G Community in Japan” in room S050 of CGIS South at 12 noon. Learn about our GIS Presentation Series.

Free Two-Hour GIS Workshops

  1. ArcGIS Online & Esri Maps for MS Office:  11/30 in Cambridge
  2. 2.       Getting the Most out of Google Earth: 12/07 in Cambridge

 

GIS for Humanists Workshop Call for Applications

This full-day workshop will be held on Thursday, 12/06. It offers hands on instruction in basic GIS tools and techniques for Humanists addressing an array of questions for both their own research interests and class pedagogy. Learning will be framed around specific tasks and results as well as the technologies to achieve, document, and analyze those findings. Instruction will include basic tools and software, GPS devices, Google Earth marking and measurements, WorldMap, and Introductory ArcGIS. Read more and register online.

 

Recent Presentations @ the CGA:

 

  • Archie Tse and Jeremy White from the New York Times presented on November 14:

Mapping the 2012 U. S. Presidential Election

 

  • Carl Nylen from Esri presented on November 14:

ArcGIS Online & Esri Maps for Office

 

  • Paul Cote presented on November 7:

Information Ecology vs Entropy: Cybernetic Infrastructure for Place-Based Research

 

  • Leif Isaksen presented on November 5:

Pelagios and Google Ancient Places: A Sea-change in Linked Ancient Data

 

  • Bernd Resch presented on November 5:

Live Geography – real time monitoring as a multidimensional research challenge in Geographic Information Science

 

  • Mei-Po Kwan presented on October 22:

Advances in Geographic Information Science for Social Science and Health Research

 

  • Carl Steinitz presented on October 3 :

Ways of Designing and The Roles of GIS

 

GSD Exhibition: Cartographic Grounds: Projecting the Landscape Imaginary

The current exhibit in the lobby of the Graduate School of Design is cartographic. Cartographic Grounds: Projecting the Landscape Imaginary reconciles the precision and instrumentality of the plan with the geographic and territorial implications of the map. In light of the ascendance of “mapping” and data visualization in design culture, and the privileging of abstract forces and flows, the exhibition reimagines the projective potential of cartographic practices that afford greater proximity to the manifestation and manipulation of the ground itself. On view through December 19 in Gund Hall.

 

Check out some CGA Products:

 

  • Rwanda Genocide Memorials

Professor Jens Meierhenrich of Harvard’s Department of Government, in cooperation with CGA, launched an interactive website in support of a multi-year project on genocide memorials in Rwanda. By showcasing original geographic, ideographic, and photographic data collected in the field, the website provides a fascinating glimpse into the ongoing project, and affords a heretofore unavailable, GIS-aided perspective on the spatial dimensions of memory in the wake of collective violence. http://www.genocidememorials.cga.harvard.edu/

 

  • Surgical Safety Web Map

CGA created a web map for the Harvard School of Public Health researchers involved with the World Health Organization “Safe Surgery Saves Lives” challenge. The goal of this challenge is to improve the safety of surgery around the world by defining a core set of safety standards that can be applied in all WHO member countries. The web map is a Google mashup, featuring participating organizations, hospitals, a global surgical rate map, and more.
http://maps.cga.harvard.edu/surgical_safety

 

  • Geographic Location Finder

Click, drag, and drop the red marker on any location. The updated latitude, longitude coordinates of its location are displayed. Copy and paste these coordinates into any application you want.
http://maps.cga.harvard.edu/gpf

 

CONFERENCES, CALLS, EVENTS & EMPLOYMENT

 

Event @ Harvard:

Title: Will “Big Data” Yield Big Insights about Human Society?

Friday, November 30, 2012

http://iacs.seas.harvard.edu/events

 

CFP: Esri Education GIS Conference - deadline 12/07

 

CFP: Forensic GIS: The Role of Geospatial Technologies for Investigating Crime and Providing Evidence - deadline 12/14

 

CFP: Call for Workshop Proposals: USGIS Symposium - deadline 12/15

 

CFP: A special issue on geospatial analysis of volunteered geographic information with Computers, Environment and Urban Systems - deadline 12/30

 

CFP: IGU 2013 Kyoto Regional Conference - deadline 01/15

 

Local Position:  Part-time GIS Technician for the City of Cambridge IT Department

 

 

 

NEWS ON GIS RESEARCH AND SERVICES

 

ESRI is using the Harvard Election Data Archive as the basis for their national map of the electorate. This archive contains data on election results, voting behavior, and electoral politics, with particular focus on the United States. The core data for the archive are state, county and district level election returns for all recent state and federal elections in the United States. Stephen Ansolabehere of Harvard and Jonathan Rodden of Stanford collaborated to create the Stanford Election Atlas webmap. This atlas reveals the locations of Democratic and Republican strongholds, and highlights the most contested, evenly divided neighborhoods.

 

How population density affected the 2012 presidential election:

 

  

 

Thanks to Andy Woodruff of the always interesting Bostonography for the shapefile of the election results.

 

Pointillist data map shows the changing face of Texas

 

What the election map would have looked like if only white men could vote

 

 

 

Mastering Iron: The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry, 1800-1868

 “Anne Kelly Knowles brings a new approach to our understanding of American iron-making by coupling  geography with the history of technology in a new book titled Mastering Iron: The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry, 1800-1868”

 

 

Esri mapped 2012 US Presidential Election National Results

 

North Atlantic Population Project

 

Using Digital Maps To Study Disaster Preparedness and History – NPR

 

To Boldly Go Where No Map Has Gone Before

 

How will Declining Federal Budgets Impact the Geospatial Market?

 

DigitalGlobe, GeoEye plan smaller satellite fleet

 

International Geographic Congress 2012: The World is Catching Up to the U.S. in Applied Geography

 

Data Basin

 

 

Editor of this issue is Molly Groome

The CGA Newsletter is published monthly.

For previously published issues please visit: http://gis.harvard.edu/newsletter

For the latest information, please visit our website http://gis.harvard.edu

Unsubscribe here: https://lists.cga.harvard.edu/mailman/options/newsletter

 

 

no links

Files:
cga_newsletter_november_20121.pdf

Share