gesis-workshop-geospatial-techniques-R

Materials for the 2021 GESIS Workshop “Geospatial Techniques in R for Social Scientists”

Stefan Jünger (stefan.juenger@gesis.org)

Anne-Kathrin Stroppe (anne-kathrin.stroppe@gesis.org)

Workshop Description

When social scientists aim to use geospatial data, they must rely on specialized tools, called Geographic Information Systems (GIS). 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. Thus, this course will teach how to exploit R and apply its geospatial techniques in a social science context. We will learn about the most common data formats, their quirks, and their application. Most importantly, the course will present data sources, how to get the data and wrangle them for further analysis. Central are geospatial operations, such as cropping, aggregating or linking data. Finally, what is of interest for many researchers is creating maps, which is also straightforward in R.

Course Schedule

Day	Time	Title
February 08	09:00am-10:30am	Introduction
February 08	10:30am-11:00am	Break
February 08	11:00am-12:30pm	Vector Data
February 08	12:30pm-01:30pm	Lunch Break
February 08	01:30pm-03:00pm	Basic Maps
February 08	03:00pm-03:30pm	Break
February 08	03:30pm-05:00pm	Raster Data
February 09	09:00am-10:30am	Advanced Data Import
February 08	10:30am-11:00am	Break
February 09	11:00am-12:30pm	Applied Data Wrangling
February 09	12:30pm-01:30pm	Lunch Break
February 09	01:30pm-01:45pm	Evaluation
February 09	01:45pm-03:00pm	Advanced Maps I
February 08	03:00pm-03:30pm	Break
February 09	03:30pm-05:00pm	Advanced Maps II