Category: GIS in Psychology

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Bucknell/Local Interest Digital Humanities Events/Calendar GIS & Environmental Justice GIS by Academic Discipline GIS in Art GIS in Biology GIS in Computer Science GIS in Economics GIS in Engineering GIS in Environmental Studies GIS in Film Studies GIS in Geography GIS in Geology GIS in History GIS in Humanities GIS in Political Science GIS in Psychology GIS in Public Health GIS in Social Science GIS in Sociology GIS in Women's Studies GIScience, Pedagogy & Spatial Thinking Slideshow

Register & Submit Presentations for Bucknell-hosted GIS conference

We recently launched the conference website for the upcoming Bucknell-hosted conference GIS & Spatial Thinking in the Undergraduate Curriculum.  Basic info is shown below, but please check out the conference website for details and updates as they become available.

About the Conference:

  • When: November 16-18, 2012
  • Where: Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA. Click here for a map.
  • Details: Click on the pages shown on the menu above to access information onregistration, lodging, conference schedule, and submitting presentations and maps.
  • Deadlines:  Deadline for early bird registration is September 15, 2012. Deadline forsubmitting presentations and maps is September 21, 2012.
  • Format:  We have chosen a work-group format for the conference in order to maximize opportunities for discussion and brain-storming amongst participants. The main day of the conference will feature five work-group sessions. Each session will consist of 45 minutes of presentations and 45 minutes of open discussion organized around a theme. We are seeking 3 presenters and 1 chairperson for each of the 5 sessions. See the submissions page for a detailed description of each of the session topics:
    • 1a (Concurrent with 1b) – Mapping Human Activity – Qualitative Analysis GIS
    • 1b (Concurrent with 1a) – Quantitative Analysis & Technical Applications of GIS
    • 2   (Single group) – GIS in Pedagogy
    • 3a (Concurrent with 3b) – GIS in Community Outreach & Service Learning
    • 3b (Concurrent with 3a) – Software & Data Issues in GIS Instruction
  • Goals: Desired outcomes include: (1) providing mutual support for imaginative and challenging applications of spatial technology in undergraduate education; (2) fostering potential collaborative efforts between and within participant schools, such as joint research initiatives and/or shared resources for data, web maps and teaching materials, and; (3) creating a regional community of faculty and GIS/IT staff to interact on a regular basis, share information, and exchange ideas about the priorities identified during the conference.

This event is sponsored by Library & Information Technology at Bucknell University. Should you have any questions, please contact Janine Glathar at jlg046@bucknell.edu or (570) 577-1990.

 

 

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Bucknell/Local Interest Data Environment General GIS GIS in Geography GIS in Psychology GIS in Public Health GIS in Sociology Slideshow

Williamsport and Lycoming County Asset Mapping

Guest post by Dan Ladd, Middlebury College ’14

One of the major projects the GIS team worked  on for much of the early part of the summer was mapping community assets in Williamsport and Lycoming County. This project was requested by Professors Ben Marsh (Geography) and Carl Milofsky (Sociology). Chad Lawlis (Environmental Studies ’11) and I worked on putting together the information for this project.

The project involved understanding regional community needs in public health, sustainability, social services, homelessness, etc. We explored how community needs like these match, or don’t match, the assets landscape that residents have access to. GIS gives a sophisticated way to understand this match at the scale at which people actuallyinteract with the world.

Much contemporary discourse about community development considers ‘sustainability’ to be ageneralized measure of the capacity of a community to replicate itself into the future. This broader idea of community sustainability describes residents as living in a series of ‘environments’ – a food environment and an activity environment support nutritional well-being, a housing environment affects homelessness, lead-paint risk, community activity, commuting costs and impacts, etc.

Data was collected on different Community Asset Classes (Churches, Healthcare providers, Food store, schools etc.). This information ranged from street address, contact information and a classification of what services each asset provided. These assets were then combined and mapped to give an idea of the spacial distribution of these assets.

 

Williamsport Community Assets

This project also serves as a template for future community asset data collection projects as the eventual goal is to expand this information to cover the Greater Central Susquehanna Valley. These proposed databases will serve as the foundation of a larger data project incorporating a ‘Community Platform’ that the university is contracting for from The Urban Institute and anascent regional ‘2-1-1’ social services phone line project.

 

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Bucknell/Local Interest Data Digital Humanities Environment General GIS GIS in Biology GIS in Computer Science GIS in Engineering GIS in Environmental Studies GIS in Geography GIS in Geology GIS in History GIS in Humanities GIS in Psychology GIS in Sociology Map Apps Marcellus Shale Miller Run Restoration Project Slideshow

What we’re up to this summer (and why we’re not posting)

Thanks to the Mellon grant and a huge number of faculty teaching and research projects it’s been a very busy summer of GIS work at Bucknell.  Over the coming weeks I’ll write detailed posts about the work we’re doing on each of the projects.  If I’m really ambitious I might try to post some interviews with faculty and students – and some footage of the aerial drone flights that Nick Urban ’12 is doing. But for now here’s a short overview of who’s doing GIS work at Bucknell this summer and what we’re doing:

GIS Student Assistants:

  • Chad Lawlis, Environmental Studies ’11
  • Dan Dougherty, Geography/History ’12
  • Max Stiss, Geography/Anthropology ’12
  • Nick Urban, Computer Science ’12
  • Mike Grasso, Environmental Studies ’13
  • Robby Holler, Geography/International Relations ’13 (pictured below)
  • Darin Rockwell, Geography/Geology ’13 (pictured below)
  • Dan Ladd, Middlebury College ’14 (pictured below)

Key Projects:

  • Maps for Sudan field guide atlas to mammals
  • GPS data collection for Lewisburg Cemetary
  • GPS data collection for Miller Run restoration project
  • Aerial drone data collection for Miller Run restoration project
  • Lycoming County/Williamsport community asset mapping
  • Mapping toxic contamination from Marcellus Shale natural gas wells
  • Mapping locations of Marcellus Shale water withdrawl permits
  • Georeferencing & vectorizing 19th century economic maps of Vietnam
  • Georeferencing & vectorizing maps of environmental hazards and resources in Kyrgyzstan
  • Georeferencing & vectorizing 1868 Historic Atlas of Union & Snyder Counties
  • Data development for Stories of the Susquehanna project
  • Support for student research projects – including GPS’ing dumpster locations on campus for an analysis of campus waste and recycling, and updating Arboretum tree dataset with location info for newly planted and felled trees
  • Develop pilot web map apps for showcasing faculty research
  • Develop pilot web map apps for use in teaching
  • Implement backend IT infrastructure to support ArcGIS server
  • Maps for Bucknell admin purposes, including: analysis of parking shortages on campus; maps for task force report on campus climate; maps for SBDC report on services by county; arts festival map.

 

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General GIS GIS in Psychology Map Apps Slideshow

Sad maps at University of Florida

A few weeks ago I posted about Cambridge University PhD student Alex Davies’ project on mapping happiness.   Over at worthlessgators.com University of Florida student(?)  ”Sad Hector’ is doing the exact opposite – mapping sadness on University of Florida’s Gainesville campus.  Prompted to ‘tell us where you’ve cried,’ visitors to the site can fill out a short form (below) with the location and details of the crying incident and then see their entry added to the GoogleMaps ‘sad map.’

Created in early March, the site already has 60+ entries mapped. Crying locations run the gamut from the predictible (fraternity row, dorms) to the scenic (shores of Lake Alice, local parks) to the  unexpected (near the Florida Museum of Natural History Ogliocene Period display).  Parking garages seem to be a fairly popular crying location at U of F.  In addition to just noting the locations of crying on campus, the site also has a link to the U of F Counseling and Wellness Center for students who want to seek help.

Thanks to Kathleen for the heads up about this site!

 

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General GIS GIS in Psychology Map Apps Slideshow

Mapping happiness

New social media mapping sites are popping up all over the place these days – whether it’s crisis-mapping sites like Sinsai.info or this new ‘happiness’ map from PhD student Alex Davies.

Davies, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge’s Computational and Biological Learning Lab, created a statistical model to analyze the sentiment (happy or sad) of Tweets from around the world.  In Davies’ model, individual words within Tweets were correlated with happiness or sadness, then used to predict the overall sentiment of the Tweet. Tweets were geo-tagged and summarized by area to calculate a composite ‘happiness’ ranking for states within the U.S. and for countries worldwide. The results are presented on Davies’ website in an interactive web map app. Raw data from the Tweets is presented alongside the maps to give viewers a sense of which Tweet words were correlated with happiness or sadness.  See below for maps of US happiness and world happiness – and an image showing some of the worldwide ‘happy’ words.

Happiness map of the United States:

 

Happiness map of the world:

Happy words for the world: