OpenStreetMap or OSM (http://openstreetmap.org/) is a free editable map of the whole world. It allows anyone to view, edit and use geographical data in a collaborative way from anywhere on Earth. Sarah Manley from Cloudmade will be our guest and will discuss how and why OSM exists, how to contribute to the project, and ways to get involved. She will also present on ways to engage students through OSM, and the open source curricula is developing.

Sarah Manley is the community ambassador at Cloudmade.com for OpenStreetMap in the Bay Area of California. As community ambassador she works to engage a wider range of participants in OpenStreetMap by organizing mapping parties, speaking engagements and collaborations with community groups. She is also working to develop a curriculum that utilizes OpenStreetMap’s data and tools.

Before joining CloudMade, Sarah worked as an educator at a New York City-based environmental organization. There, she developed and delivered curriculum to students that focused on renewable energy technologies, local ecology and sustainable design. Sarah is also a co-founder and board member of an environmentally focused charter school in New York City.

If you plan to attend please RSVP to cengel [at] stanford.

GISSIG events are sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center (http://shc.stanford.edu) and the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (http://iriss.stanford.edu).

For a calendar or GIS related events @ Stanford see:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/gissig/cgi-bin/wordpress/events

Update:

Sarah has made her slides available here:
http://www.slideshare.net/Sarah_Manley/stanford-presentation-to-gissig

The audio recording of the session is here:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/gissig/Open_Street_Map.mp3

Marcia Castro is Assistant Professor Of Demography in the Department of Global Health and Population at Harvard’s School of Public Health. She earned her PhD in Demography at Princeton, and has written extensively on malaria, mosquito control, and spatial demography. 

The Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies Winter Colloquium is a lecture series for students, the Stanford community, and the general public that presents the latest scientific findings in demography, epidemiology, genetics, and other areas in the field of population and resource studies. 

The Winter Colloquium is held on Wednesdays of the Winter Quarter, 4:15 p.m. in Herrin Hall T-175 (Biological Sciences building). 

Contact Jim Collins, (650)723-7518, or email morrisoninstitute@stanford.edu for more information. 

The remaining 2009 Colloquium schedule: 

Wed., 24 Feb. Marcia Castro 

Harvard University 

Improving Malaria Understanding and Control with the Aid of Spatial Analytical Approaches 

Wed., 4 Mar. Rebecca Bird 

Stanford University 

Fire-Stick ‘Farming’: Hunter-Gatherer Landscape Mosaics in the Western Desert of Australia

The next GISSIG lunch meeting will be Monday, March 9 at the Humanities Center.

The Use and Abuse of Spatial Analysis in Historical Research

Yair Mintzker

Ph.D. Candidate, History Department

Geballe Dissertation Prize Fellow, Stanford Humanities Center

Recent technological advances such as GIS software and google earth offer historians new, exciting ways for gathering and analyzing spatial data about the past.  But especially for historians, “spatial analysis” could also be misleading, and cover up, rather than help to dis-cover, fundamental aspects of the period and people they study.

Drawing on an extensive use of GIS software in his dissertation on European urban history as well as on his work on the conceptual history of space, Yair’s talk will shed light on these two fundamental aspects of spatial analysis: when and how is it useful for historical research, and when and how could it be harmful in advancing the historian’s objectives.

Location TBD. Please RSVP Carlos Seligo (moth@stanford.edu) if you think you will come, so we can get some idea of the  space we will need for his visit.

Peter Birch joined Google in 2006.  He is responsible for the direction, growth, and success of the Google Earth product family including Google Earth Free, Plus, Pro, and Enterprise, the Google Earth API and browser plug-in, and Google Earth for the iPhone.  He has 17 years of professional experience in the computer graphics industry. Prior to joining Google, he was the Graphics Hardware Lead in Microsoft’s Xbox group, managing the architecture, implementation, and manufacturing for the Xbox360 graphics chipset. Before Xbox, Peter spent ten years at Silicon Graphics, Inc., working on both hardware and software projects, including the Personal Iris, Indigo, Indigo2, and Octane graphics workstations and the OpenGL and Inventor graphics library products.
Peter received a BS summa cum laude in Electronic Engineering from California Polytechnic State University- San Luis Obispo and an MBA from the University of California- Berkeley Haas School of Business.

Download Slide Presentation

Google Earth can improve your outreach and communication with the world, and can effectively impact policy and public understanding of science. But many wonder how to represent their data, and how to get started. Karin will show several compelling examples of visualizing different types of data and projects in Google Earth (30 min), and show you tips and tricks about different tools and methods to get you started (60 min). While this won’t be an in-depth hands-on training, feel free to bring your laptop with Google Earth installed to follow along.

This GISSIG event was organized by Branner Earth Sciences Library. GISSIG events are sponsored by IRiSS and the Stanford Humanities Center.

Communicating the Structure and Evolution of Science

Katy B ö rner
Indiana University
http://scimaps.org/

Cartographic maps of physical places have guided mankind’s explorations for centuries. They enabled the discovery of new worlds while also marking territories inhabited by unknown monsters. Domain maps of abstract semantic spaces, see scimaps.org , aim to serve today’s explorers’ understanding and navigating the world of science. The maps are generated through scientific analysis of large-scale scholarly datasets in an effort to connect and make sense of the bits and pieces of knowledge they contain. They can be used to objectively identify major research areas, experts, institutions, collections, grants, papers, journals, and ideas in a domain of interest. Local maps provide overviews of a specific area: its homogeneity, import-export factors, and relative speed. They allow one to track the emergence, evolution, and disappearance of topics and help to identify the most promising areas of research. Global maps show the overall structure and evolution of our collective scholarly knowledge.

This talk will present an overview of the techniques used to study science by scientific means together with sample science maps and their interpretations.

Katy Börner is the Victor H. Yngve Associate Professor of Information Science at the School of Library and Information Science, Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Informatics, Core Faculty of Cognitive Science, Research Affiliate of the Biocomplexity Institute, Fellow of the Center for Research on Learning and Technology, Member of the Advanced Visualization Laboratory, and Founding Director of the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at Indiana University. She is a curator of the Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibit, http://scimaps.org/ .

Her research focuses on the development of data analysis and visualization techniques for information access, understanding, and management.

Attendance is open, subject to availability.

Mike Dvorak
Researcher, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Atmosphere/Energy Program

“Earth, wind, and GRASS: A multifaceted approach to engineering problem solving using open source, free, and cheap GIS”

While some expensive commercial GIS software can singlehandedly do nearly any GIS task, there exists a plethora of open source alternatives.  The problem is often locating the proper open source GIS software for the job.  Due to varying degrees of software maturity, open source GIS software can often involve a trial and error process to accomplish a given GIS task.  Although this process can be time consuming, the end result can often be worth the extra initial effort.  Open source GIS software often runs on high performance operating systems (e.g. Linux) that can be easily and securely networked, large problems sizes and datasets can often be conquered.  Other free/cheap options are explored where an open source alternative does not exist. Through two illustrative examples from engineering, each GIS software is highlighted, with the strengths and weaknesses of each software discussed.

Mike Dvorak is a PhD student in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Stanford University. His main area of research is quantifying where and how much offshore wind energy exists in the US and the world. He is currently working on quantifying the wind energy off the Western Coast of the United States.

Dan Contreras, Lecturer at the Dept. of Anthropology:
“Quantifying Looting - Hybrid Research Using Google Earth and ArcGIS”

International response to the problem of looting of archaeological sites has been hampered by the difficulty of reliably quantifying the damage done. The scarcity of reliable information about the scale of archaeological site looting hampers professional and public policy making, making consensus about the scale of damage from looting and the effectiveness of policy responses difficult to achieve. Dan Contreras and Neil Brodie have been exploring the use of publicly-available remotely-sensed imagery for quantifying damage done by looting of archaeological sites in Jordan, resulting in a GIS database of looted sites. The ease of use and affordability of such imagery as that provided by Google Earth make the identification, quantification, and monitoring of archaeological site looting possible at a level previously unimagined; however, Google Earth is most effective as a research tool if combined with true GIS software. This talk will focus on the process of using Google Earth and ArcGIS in tandem, highlighting our eventual successes as well as salient difficulties.

Daniel Contreras is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and the Archaeology Center at Stanford. He received his PhD in 2007, with a dissertation entitled Sociopolitical and Geomorphologic Dynamics at Chavín de Huántar, Peru. He continues to carry out research on landscape change and human-environment interactions at Chavín, is also involved in research into the consumption and procurement of obsidian at that site and its primary obsidian source some 600 km away, and maintains a strong interest in the use of digital tools in archaeological research. In addition, he is investigating the use of publicly-available satellite imagery to monitor and quantify looting damage at archaeological sites.

An Introduction to GIS workshop is being offered Wednesday, Oct 29 from 9am-noon. The cost is $153 for non-UC affiliates. A course outline is listed below:

Intro to Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

* Presentation
o What is GIS?
o Geospatial Data Considerations
o Geoprocessing and spatial analysis
o Data Sources
o Using ArcGIS 9.2
* Interactive
o Finding and downloading spatial data
o Creating a new shapefile
o Simple geoprocessing
o Creating a map for export

The GIF workshop schedule can be found at:
http://gif.berkeley.edu/support/workshops.html