Geospatial Workshop is Now Ready to Teach!

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

The long-awaited Data Carpentry curriculum for working with Geospatial data is now ready to teach! As with all our newly developed curricula, these lessons are now in ‘beta’. We are actively promoting workshops and collecting information from those workshops to improve these lessons as they are taught more broadly and in different contexts. We will also be onboarding Instructors to prepare them to teach these new lessons. Keep reading for more details.

So what’s in the material?

This R-based geospatial workshop will introduce project organisation and management for spatial data, cover data structures and storage and transfer formats, teach the creation of summary statistics and publication-quality graphics, and help users work with and plot vector and raster-format spatial data in R. Find more information on the workshop homepage.

Want to teach this material?

We will be onboarding Instructors to prepare them to teach these new lessons. We also want to run some pilot workshops so that we can assess what we have got right, and what might still need some tweaking.

Lesson background

These lessons were initially developed in 2016 through a hackathon held in conjunction with the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). Hackathon participants included the following people who became the initial authors of the lessons: Leah A. Wasser - University of Colorado, Megan A. Jones - NEON, Zack Brym - University of Florida, Kristina Riemer - University of Florida, Jason Williams - Cold Spring Harbor Lab, Jeff Hollister - US Environmental Protection Agency, Mike Smorul - SESYNC, Joseph Stachelek - Michigan State University, Marissa Guarinello - NKN/University of Idaho, Jonah Duckles - The Carpentries, Keely Roth - University of California at Davis, Mike Alonzo - NASA Goddard, Ben Best - Duke / UCSB, Matt Kwit - Duke, Tracy Teal - The Carpentries, Kaitlin Stack Whitney - University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dave Roberts - Montana State, Courtney Soderberg - Center for Open Science, Sean Barberie - University of Alaska Fairbanks. The workshop materials were piloted in March 2016, and the lesson release has been much anticipated by Carpentries’ community members. Most of the data used in the workshop has been sourced from NEON (https://www.neonscience.org/). You can see other NEON tutorials for advanced GIS topics here (https://www.neonscience.org/resources/data-tutorials).

Recent community involvement

Recent developments in these materials have been led by a highly active and engaged group of Maintainers (Lachlan Deer, Juan Fung, Lauren O’Brien, Chris Prener, Janani Selvaraj, Joseph Stachelek , Tyson Swetnam, Jane Wyngaard) and Curriculum Advisors (Anne Fouilloux - University of Oslo, Arthur Endsley - University of Michigan, Chris Prener - St Louis University, Jeff Hollister - US Environmental Protection Agency, Joseph Stachelek - Michigan State University, Leah Wasser - University of Colorado, Michael Sumner - Australian Antarctic Data Centre, Michele Tobias- University of California, Davis, Stace Maples - Stanford University).

If you are interested in the direction and decisions the Curriculum Advisors took for the lesson, you can see their minutes. The finalisation of many parts of the material was down to a big burst of work during the April 2018 Bug BBQ. Thanks to all the community members who took part.

Special thanks go to: Lauren O’Brien for re-organizing the Geospatial Project Organization and Management lesson to line up with changes to the rest of the curriculum. Lachlan Deer, Juan Fung, Joseph Stachelek, Anne Fouilloux and Justin Millar for converting all of the episodes to ggplot from base R graphics. Joseph Stachelek for transferring the lessons to the current lesson template. Chris Prener for updating the installation instructions and creating a Docker image for the lessons. Leah A. Wasser and Megan A. Jones for providing an introduction to the data used in the lesson. Michael Culshaw-Maurer, Anne Fouilloux, Michael Heeremans, Megan A. Jones, Natalie Robinson, Joseph Stachelek, Tracy Teal, Michele Tobias, and Leah A. Wasser for teaching pilot workshops. NEON for collecting and sharing the data, organizing and co-hosting the 2016 Hackathon, and providing staff time to produce these lessons.

Teach or host a Geospatial workshop!

Want to get involved with the Geospatial materials? Get badged to teach the Geospatial lessons. Sign up for onboarding using this Etherpad. Onboarding sessions also appear on the Community Calendar. Request a Geospatial beta pilot workshop at your institution using this form. Self-organise a Geospatial beta pilot workshop at your institution. Use our Self-Organised workshop checklist to plan your workshop..