During a warm week in July, I spent three days at UCL in London running GIS courses in conjunction with Clear Mapping Co, the ADRC-E (Administrative Data Research Centre for England) and the CDRC (Consumer Data Research Centre). We ran three one day courses, developing the courses we had run at UCL in February. It was great to come back and increase the number of people who could benefit from using GIS and spatial data in their work.
We had a wide range of participants, from PhD students and researchers, to those working in Government, charities and a wide variety of other applications. We even had someone who was making the leap from working for a large commercial company to going freelance at the end of July – good luck!
Our colouring in exercise was a great success and really got the students thinking about how we choose the colours we use on a choropleth map, as well as how we select the classification boundaries for the data. We gave the students one data set, and the 20 students created 20 different maps. The lesson was to make sure you think about which colours and classifications you choose – don’t just stick with the defaults your GIS program gives you. They are always not the best!
During these and other courses, we found a few people who had experimented with the ggmap/ggplot2 libaries for making maps in R, in addition to the base R plot commands (which I tend to teach). I know there is quite a division between ggplot users and base plot users (see here https://flowingdata.com/2016/03/22/comparing-ggplot2-and-r-base-graphics/ for a good comparison) and while there are many pros and cons to each system, and some very good examples out there (https://rstudio-pubs-static.s3.amazonaws.com/79029_b56eaffe36ef44f29b8efc0a07d67208.html). I’ve not yet come across a pros and cons article for spatial data. Does anyone know of one?
It’s always great teaching GIS to people who haven’t used it before. There is so much potential with spatial data; for more information about the GIS courses we can offer and how GIS could be useful for you, take a look at our ISSUU or get in contact with Nick who will be able to develop a bespoke course suited to your requirements. Email Nick at nick@clearmapping.co.uk, or call 01326 337072.
Cross-posted at http://www.clearmapping.co.uk/our-blog/item/490-introduction-to-gis-and-confident-spatial-analysis-ucl-london.html.