Category: General GIS

Categories
Bucknell/Local Interest Digital Humanities General GIS GIS Jobs, Internships, Scholarships & Grad Programs Map Apps Slideshow

2 new job openings in GIS/digital scholarship at Bucknell

Bucknell has created 2 new job positions – GIS/Web Application Specialist and Digital Scholarship Coordinator – to support digital scholarship initiatives on campus. Click here to apply. The new hires will be part of the ITEC group within the Library and IT Division and will join a team of instructional technology specialists who focus on integrating GIS, digital media and other technologies across the curriculum at Bucknell.

Our ideal candidate for the GIS/Web Application Specialist position will have strong tech skills in GIS and web development combined with an interest in visualization and data graphics in general. As the first person to fill this role, the GIS/Web Application Specialist will have an opportunity to set the tone for what digital scholarship projects will look like at Bucknell. We are looking for someone who is creative, innovative and thrives on learning new tools & technologies. In addition to GIS and application development, the GIS/Web Application Specialist will have an opportunity to delve into a wide range of other types of visualizations – including timelines, networks, interactive graphs/charts, etc. – to create highly-interactive sites that showcase faculty & student research and can serve as teaching/scholarship tools. 

We have a wide range of exciting teaching and research projects already underway and we’re looking for these new hires to help showcase those efforts and take digital scholarship to a new level at Bucknell. I’ve been here for 3 and a half years and can tell you that Bucknell is an amazing place to work. The atmosphere is both collegial and collaborative. The faculty have a deep commitment to engaging students in learning, both in the classroom and through faculty-led and independent student research projects. In the last 4 years, Bucknell has created five new positions (GIS Specialist, Video Specialist, Instructional Technology Specialist, GIS/Web Application Specialist and Digital Scholarship Coordinator) to support this type of work on campus. That alone speaks volumes about the high level of support we have from the university administration and Library & IT leadership for doing innovative work.

If you are interested in either of these jobs or know of someone who might be, please check out the job descriptions. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions. Click here to apply.

 

 

Categories
Bucknell/Local Interest General GIS GIS Jobs, Internships, Scholarships & Grad Programs Slideshow

GIS Job Opportunities – Azavea

In previous posts, I’ve mentioned some of the cool projects that Azavea (a GIS consulting firm in Philly) is involved in.  Things like…

Well, here’s your chance to spend a summer working for them. Azavea recently announced a paid internship program for Summer 2012 – but you have to move fast to make the April 2nd application deadline.  Here’s the write-up with details and an application form from the Azavea Summer of Maps homepage.

We are pleased to announce the first Azavea Summer of Maps. Inspired by the Google Summer of Code, Summer of Maps is a program that offers stipends to student GIS analysts to perform geospatial data analysis for non-profit organizations. We are going to match up non-profit organizations that have spatial analysis needs with talented students of GIS analysis to implement projects over a three-month period during the summer.

 What’s in it for the students?

  • Work on a spatial analysis project that supports the social mission of a non-profit organization
  • Work with Azavea mentors to improve your GIS skills
  • Receive a monthly stipend
  • Gain work experience implementing a GIS project

Key dates:

Mar 21 – April 2 – Students submit proposals and applications

April 2 – 13 – Top candidates are interviewed in Philadelphia

April 16 – Azavea announces successful Summer of Maps fellows

May 14 – August 31 – Summer of Maps fellows work on spatial analysis projects

 

 

Categories
Bucknell/Local Interest Digital Humanities General GIS GIS in History Slideshow

Faculty GIS Profiles: Song Chen, Assistant Professor of Chinese History

The following is a guest post by Prof. Song Chen, Assistant Professor of Chinese History, who arrived on campus in fall 2011. Click here to read the profile of Prof. Chen that was posted on the Bucknell website. In addition to his use of GIS for research purposes, Prof. Chen is planning to integrate GIS into a Spring 2013 quantitative methods course for history majors. Below is Prof. Chen’s description of how he uses GIS in his research on connections between the imperial state and local elites in 10th-13th century China:

My research combines GIS, network analysis, and prosopographical research. To understand the relationship between the imperial state and local elites in China, I use GIS to map out geographical patterns of civil servants and their marriage networks. Though my recent work relies primarily on a dataset I have personally built from a collection of several hundred funerary biographies from the 10th to the 13th century, I have also benefited significantly from other existing data collections and databases. I owe much to the China Biographical Database (CBDB) and China Historical GIS (CHGIS) projects.

CBDB is an online relational database under development but already contains about 120,000 historical figures. It contains massive geo-biographical data points, which are easily cross-queried and exported. CHGIS provides the most complete and authoritative point and polygon files for places in Chinese history. In future projects, I also plan to use GIS tools to visualize and analyze patterns of demographic settlement, economic activities, and social and intellectual interactions. I have also found G. William Skinner’s datasets on China tremendously useful.

The following maps, for example, are generated by combining CBDB data and CHGIS polygon files and coordinates, with graduated symbology in ArcGIS. They show the native places of civil officials who were in the Sichuan region (the four highlighted administrative divisions) between 960 and 1279. These maps allow me to discover macrohistorical patterns of local governance during these centuries: a growing tendency of having native men staffing local offices in the Sichuan region.

Click image below for larger view.

 

Categories
Bucknell/Local Interest Digital Humanities Environment General GIS GIS in Environmental Studies Marcellus Shale Slideshow

GIS in the Classroom (and dorms): Environmental Residential College

In fall 2011, Professors Steve Jordan and Chris Daniels assigned a semester-long documentary project to students in Bucknell’s Environmental Residential College. The goal was to create video essays to tell the story of how the Marcellus Shale gas boom is impacting communities in northeastern Pennsylvania. Students visited communities impacted by the gas boom to conduct interviews and capture video footage that would help them tell the story of the local contexts in which the gas boom is taking place across the state.

In addition to other research methods, the teams of students used GIS to explore the spatial footprint of the gas boom on different communities. Students were tasked with integrating the spatial aspect of the story into their video essays. The clip below is taken from the ‘Hydrofracking & Air’ video created by students Zoe Gaston, Claire Rapp, Sarah Baker, Thuyvan Luu, Colin Lind and Kyle Montgomery – all first-year students in Bucknell’s Environmental Residential College.

video platform video management video solutions video player

To create the map animation seen in the video, the students worked with me to visualize GIS data in ArcMap and export the data to a GoogleEarth KML format. Next, the students used GoogleEarth to draw the estimated pathway of the pipeline connecting several air compressor stations in their area of interest. Then the students created an animation in GoogleEarth that was spliced into the video essay to illustrate the point they were trying to make about air pollution associated with natural gas infrastructure. By the way… in a few months Bucknell GIS expects to have data on all infrastructure related to natural gas and electricity generation in Pennsylvania – including pipelines and transmission lines (so that next time we’ll be able to be more precise than we were with the ‘connect the dot’ approach we employed in this video).

Click here to see the full-length ‘Hydrofracking & Air’ video and other videos submitted by students in the class.

 

Categories
Bucknell/Local Interest Events/Calendar General GIS Map Apps Slideshow

Bucknell GIS brings home an IronSheep

Over the holidays we posted about Prof. Duane Griffin’s victory in the FloatingSheep blog’s Christmas map contest. Well, Duane has once again brought glory (or infamy, depending on which way you look at it) to Bucknell GIS by winning the coveted ‘Sheep of Fools’ award at the first ever IronSheep contest.

The contest, part of the slate of activities for the 2012 annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers, was hosted by Pivotal Labs near Union Square in NYC, and featured 7 teams of ‘lightning mappers’ comprised of geographers, GIS analysts, data hounds, web developers and other assorted mapping/data visualization enthusiasts. As described in the FloatingSheep blog’s announcement of the event, the premise of the IronSheep competition was to…

mimic the format of the “Iron Chef” television series. This workshop challenges participants (grouped into teams with members from diverse backgrounds and skill sets) to produce meaningful analysis and fun, evocative mash-ups from the same sets of user-generated, geo-coded data within a four hour time frame. The goal is to provide a semi-structured environment where participants can socialize and work in a fun yet socially meaningful project. Participants will be drawn from academic, industry and artistic communities from around the world… Teams will be assigned a targeted question…and use crowdsourced data to create a new geo-visualization.

And that we did… for four hours the teams crunched, analyzed, mapped, visualized and animated datasets ranging from UFO sightings and WalMart store locations to Flickr geotags for “Redneck” and ‘Hippy.” Click here to read the FloatingSheep blog’s recap of the event and to see pictures from the event. See below for pictures of the teams hard at work.

Some interesting discussions about neo-geography (e.g. open geography/VGI/geoweb/web mapping services) vs. traditional GIS arose during the IronSheep debriefing session held on the final day of the AAG conference. Click here to read Jeremy Crampton’s overview of the debate or here to check out the Twitter stream about the topic.

Team Rambouillet (my team – we didn’t win any IronSheep awards but we had a lot of fun)

 

Team Haggis (Prof. Duane Griffin’s team – winners of the “Sheep of Fools” award)

 

This is one of Team Haggis’s entries. As described by Duane Griffin, “It’s the number of ‘Redneck’ and ‘Hippy’ Flikr geotags within 7.5 miles of a UFO sighting, to see who the aliens are most likely trying to target.”

 

Team Haggis showing off their IronSheep

 

The coveted “Sheep of Fools” award