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Materials for the 2021 ESRA Short Course “First Steps on Using R as a Geographic Information System”
Stefan Jünger (stefan.juenger@gesis.org)
When social scientists aim to use geospatial data, they must rely on specialized tools, called Geographic Information Systems (GIS). GIS are tools to visualize, process, and analyze geospatial data. However, the world of GIS is complicated since often only foreign software solutions provide a comprehensive collection of available geospatial techniques. Fortunately, nowadays, social scientists can also use the statistical software R as a proper GIS. In recent years, not only the range of supported geospatial file formats in R was expanded, it is nowadays way easier to wrangle such complicated data. Most importantly, the collection of applicable geospatial techniques heavily increased.
This course will teach the first steps of exploiting R and applying its geospatial techniques. Participants who are at least on an intermediate-level of expertise in R will learn about the most common data formats, how to get the data, and wrangle them for further analysis. Finally, many researchers’ interest is creating maps, which is also straightforward and fun to do in R. The course will therefore end with plotting maps to give participants a visual memento and stimulate future work with geospatial data in R.
| Time | Title |
|---|---|
| 01:00pm-01:20pm | Introduction |
| 01:20pm-01:30pm | Exercise 1: R Warm up |
| 01:30pm-02:00pm | Data Processing & Spatial Linking |
| 02:00pm-02:30pm | Exercise 2: Geospatial Data Wrangling |
| 02:30pm-02:45pm | Break |
| 02:45pm-03:15pm | Easy Maps |
| 03:15pm-03:45pm | Excercise 3: Build your own map |
| 03:45pm-04:00pm | Closing, Q & A |
2 Data Processing & Spatial Linking