Week 0 Class 1

Welcome

  1. SOC128. GIS. TuTh + Tu Lab in Stern 14.
  2. PHOTOS, introductions, name tents
  3. 60% software use; 10% data analytical thinking; 20% geography/cartography, 10% social science
  4. Work Load: Standard 2-3 hours outside class for each hour in class. Expect about 6-8 hours in front of the computer per week minimum. Some of that will be reading.
  5. Class is expected; lab is mandatory. If you miss more than a few I'll probably ask you to drop the course.
  6. Grading heavily influence by timely completion of assignments, quizzes, tutorials and the like. This is a learn by doing class.
  7. You have the chance here to get somewhat "teched up." You can learn a lot about a small piece of computational social science. You can grab yourself some employable skills. If you are not interested in eagerly pursuing such things, please take some other course. You will be bored and you will be boring if you can't for at least this semester get to a space where you enjoy playing with computers.
  8. You will be expected to learn how to think, how to do things, and just plain learn stuff.
  1. http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/index.html
  1. What is GIS? Long story short, computerized cartography. Is it new? No. Is there currently a revolution in it? Yes.
  2. What is a map? Visual, generally 2 dimensional, representation of spatial information. A model of the real world. An abstraction.
  1. Quick Exercise. Go online to FieldPapers.ORG. Mills College. Zoom in. Print. Take print out and mark it up. Upload it. Edit it in ID. Trace outline. Add to OSM.
  2. How did we do that? OSM as the wikipedia of spatial information. Why does that matter. Open source and public domain vs. copyrighted geographical information.
  3. Base maps/boundary layers.

Assignment

Sign up for accounts at OpenStreetMap.ORG (OSM.ORG) and FieldPapers.ORG. Record your username and password. Submit your username.
Draw something, anything, on the FieldPapers atlas you were given in class. Based on what you read on the site, try to come up with some way of taking a digital version of your map and uploading it to the site. You don't need to succeed; you need to have a story of how you tried to do it.

Vocabulary Encountered Today
GIS
layer
boundary
polygon
points