What Are We Mapping?

Workshop goals

location of Harvard Map Collection to the left of Widener steps in the yard in between Quincy St + Mass Ave

  • Today we are going to be reverse engineering an example mapping project supported by the Harvard Map Collection
  • The materials today, rather than leaving you feeling like an expert on GIS are meant to provide a sense or a sample of what’s possible with GIS, and typify the kind of subject expertise and support resources available to you through the library
  • As we work through the materials together, don’t worry about memorizing the technical specifics presented
  • “The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.” - Albert Einstein

How to follow up

  • We will refrain this information again at the end, so don’t worry if you miss it
  • The Harvard Map Collection website is where you can make appointments to see maps and get help with geospatial data
  • The GIS Outreach Librarian is a resource to point you to services, if you’re not exactly sure what your next step is
  • If today’s workshop has sufficiently piqued your interest, we do offer other in-depth workshops with an even more hands-on focus on foundational GIS software. You can search and register for these in the library website, or request them for your group
  • Also available in the library calendar are listings for our weekly office hours. You can either drop into office hours with no appointment, or use the Harvard Map Collection website to schedule an appointment for in-person or remote

Project Background

In 2023, the Harvard Map Collection partnered with with Tara Menon’s English class, City Fictions. In this course, students consider experiences of a place from many perspectives (written, lived, mapped, etc.). The mapping assignment prompts students to create two maps of the same place, which each tell a different story.

Libby Wu’s stand-out project looks at the intersection of fitness and recreation with demographics and access by public transportation.

In her first map, she obtains the location of basketball courts from New York City open data, and augments the dataset with notable historic locations. She then overlays this data with a demographic map of poverty rate, as well as subway lines.

In Libby’s second map, she collects locations for fitness courses such as cycling, pilates, yoga, and boxing from fitness apps she uses and compares that against demographic data for non-white populations. She also continues to overlay transit access.

Each of these maps on its own tell stories, but in conversation start a dialogue that is relevant to topics the class discussed and read about related to experiences of place.

Concepts 🤝 data

Libby’s maps are successful because, even before opening any mapping tool, she had already workshopped ideas for what she wanted to say or explore with her maps, and spent time refining those ideas with searches for available data.

Part of scoping a mapping project requires understanding data availability. The purpose of this workshop is to practice using some commonly requested GIS datasets, to get a sense of what is possible.

What will we map in this workshop?

Demographic data

We are going to practice downloading the census datasets Libby uses, show where to obtain this type of data, and what is required to be able to work with these datasets for mapping.

Fitness locations

We are going to look at the coordinate data Libby created showing the locations of courts and fitness classes to understand how location data is structured, so that you could create datasets of your own.

Subway stops

We will practice searching for spatial data “in the wild” in NYC’s open data portal, and we’ll take Libby’s project a step further by practicing basic spatial analysis using walking buffers around the train stops to explore transit access.

Historic maps

We will learn how to compare a historic map against all of these modern data layers. This will help us practice spatial humanities methods, as well as spell out the difference between vector (e.g. point locations, census tracts, subway lines) vs raster (image pixels) GIS data.

Data housekeeping

Where is the workshop data?

The workshop data for this course is available from the Harvard_Map_Collection_Workshop_Data folder. You can download the whole folder to your computer.

How is the workshop data organized?

The pace of in-person workshops varies group-by-group. Some folks want to spend lots of time really understanding each step, some folks want to fly and move ahead quickly. We want to give you both options.

On the day of the workshop, we will establish a median pace. If you haven’t personally moved on from any given step before we’re ready to move on as a group, the tutorial instructions refer to pre-made datasets for each step increment. This way, you can follow along in person, and refer more deeply to previous steps using the tutorial instructions later.