Working with spatial data – a beginners’ workshop

Instructor: Monika Barget, Assistant Professor in History
Date: 26 April 2023
Time: 10.30-12.30
Venue: The Plant, FASoS building 76, ground floor

In this joint AMC/The Plant workshop for beginners, participants will explore the possibilities and challenges of working with spatial data in the humanities and social sciences. Spatial analysis is an important research objective in disciplines from history to politics and literary studies. However, collecting and analysing spatial data can be difficult and time-consuming as most spatial information comes in unstructured text from which place names must be extracted. To plot place names on maps, they also need to be geocoded, for which different tools are available, but not all are free or easy to use. This beginners’ workshop will introduce the potential of spatial data and will highlight some strategies to automatically collect them from existing databases. It will also demonstrate how Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology can be used to read place names from maps or collect them in a spreadsheet. In the hands-on part of the workshop, participants will have the chance to geocode sample data using Python scripts and different geocoding APIs. You are welcome to bring your data in table format (CSV or EXCEL) or use sample data provided by the instructor.

Requirements: You do not need any previous knowledge of spatial data or GIS to participate. We ask you to bring your own laptops. Code and sample data will be shared in the following Github Tutorial prior to the workshop: https://monikabarget.github.io/GeoHumTutorials/ Further instructions which data to download will sent to the participants in due time. For running the Python code, we will use Google Colab, so please sign in on https://colab.research.google.com/ with an existing Google account or create a new account specifically for this purpose. You will also need Google Drive (linked with the same account) to read and write data. Advantages and risks of working with proprietary software will be explained in the detailed instructions.