Category Archives: training

R for Spatial Analysis Courses in Liverpool and London

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This week I have run two courses on ‘Introduction to Using R for Spatial Analysis’ which have been very successful. Both courses sold out, with 15 people attending in Liverpool and 20 in London. We had people with a wide range of GIS and R experience, ranging from no experience in either GIS or R, to significant experience in one but little in the other.

2015-12-02 11.34.09We covered the basics of using R through the RStudio interface, which I find makes R easier to understand for newbies! I certainly found it much easier to learn R using RStudio, and still use it everyday for my R work (I’ve opened the native R interface maybe twice since I started using it!). We also looked projections and coordinate systems (which were at the bottom of a GIS problem a colleague had today) and at spatial data representation, particularly how to create a representative, truthful choropleth map, and I made use of a blog post about this very issue, which I recently tweeted.

2015-12-02 11.34.21We also had a number of very interesting discussions about the pros and cons of R vs other GIS software, such as ArcGIS or QGIS, as well as other languages, such as Python. Each has their own pros and cons, and in my work I regularly use a mix of these, depending on what I am trying to achieve.

 I am also in the process of developing an intermediate course that will focus more on spatial analysis. If you are interested in finding out more about when either the basic or the intermediate courses will be run again, please send me a message (using the contact form on this site) and I will add you to a list to hear about future courses.

All of the material from this course is freely available, and hosted on GitHub. Head over to http://github.com/nickbearman/intro-r-spatial-analysis and you can view the material yourself and work through it at your own pace. You can even use it to contribute to new teaching material, and if you do, please also make your material available through Creative Commons so others can benefit from it as well.

Cross-posted at http://geographicdatascience.com/blog/training/R-for-Spatial-Analysis-Courses-in-Liverpool-and-London/.

Introduction to Using R for Spatial Analysis

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On Friday 23rd January 2015, I ran a one day workshop on an Introduction to Using R for Spatial Analysis. We had 18 participants (thanks for squeezing in, everyone!) from a wide variety of backgrounds in R, from never having used R to using R relatively regularly, but not used it as a GIS. The course ran really well, and I was very happy with it, given that it was the first time I had run this course in this format. If you are interested in attending this course in the future, please send me a message (using the contact form on this site) and I will add you to a list to hear about future courses.

I’ve attached the materials I used to this blog post (see below). My material available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (seehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en for details), which means that the material I created for this training session is free for anyone to use, as long as you attribute the material to me, and make any material you derive from this available under the same license. I would also ask you to let me know when you use my material, as it’s useful for me to know how many people are using it, and what sort of courses they are using it for.

Introduction to QGIS: Understanding and Presenting Spatial Data

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On Thursday 22nd January 2015, I ran a one day workshop on an Introduction to QGIS: Understanding and Presenting Spatial Data. We had 14 participants from a wide variety of backgrounds, academic areas and geographic locations. The course ran very well, and the participants seemed to enjoy taking the course as much as I enjoyed delivering it! If you are interested in attending this course in the future, please send me a message (using the contact form on this site) and I will add you to a list to hear about future courses.

I’ve attached the materials I used to this blog post (see below). My material available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en for details), which means that the material I created for this training session is free for anyone to use, as long as you attribute the material to me, and make any material you derive from this available under the same license. I would also ask you to let me know when you use my material, as it’s useful for me to know how many people are using it, and what sort of courses they are using it for.

Introduction to QGIS: Understanding and Presenting Spatial Data

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On Monday 17th November, I ran a day course on Spatial Data and QGIS with 15 participants. We had people from a wide range of backgrounds and interests, including geology, politics, health and many other disciplines. We looked at some of the theory behind GIS, such as projections and coordinate systems, as well as practical elements on how to use QGIS. I managed to get QGIS version 2.6 (Brighton) installed on the University systems, which only came out towards the end of October, so it was great that the participants could see and use the latest version. We also looked at the process of classifying data for cholopleth maps, including the important decisions to make when selecting colours, number of classes and method of classification.

I’ve attached the materials I used to this blog post (see below). I took the decision to make my material available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en for details), which means that the material I created for this training session is free for anyone to use, as long as you attribute the material to me, and make any material you derive from this available under the same license. I would also ask you to let me know when you use my material, as it’s useful for me to know how many people are using it, and what sort of courses they are using it for.

In this form, some of the resources will be more useful than others, but I hope they are helpful. Any comments are gratefully received, either via email, or through  comments below.

Happy GISing!

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