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Save the Date for Geography Awareness Week 2020

By WashU Libraries

Data Services is gearing up for another event-filled Geography Awareness Week taking place November 16–20. Created in 1987 through a joint resolution in the U.S. Congress, Geography Awareness Week is a time for educators, organizations, and communities to promote the importance of geography in people’s lives. Geography is especially important this year, as it has an impact on the pandemic, voting, the census count, and social inequities.

For Geography Awareness Week 2020, we will focus on geography and social justice and feature a series of blog posts highlighting WashU community members who have worked on social justice projects with a spatial aspect. In addition, we will host a panel discussion on Friday, November 20, at 10:00 a.m. on mapping social justice. The speakers will address housing voting, racial violence, and ethical land use. The members of the panel are:

  • John Cruz, Data Management Coordinator at Rise STL
  • Caitlin Lee, Researcher, Writer & Designer
  • Marguerite Madden, Director of the Center for Geospatial Research and Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Georgia
  • Gena Gunn McClendon, Director of Voter Access Engagement and the Financial Capability and Asset Building Initiatives at the Center for Social Development
  • Geoff Ward, Professor of African and African-American Studies, Sociology, and American Culture Studies at Washington University

Geography Awareness Week will also include daily workshops on various GIS topics:

  • Monday November 16, 10–11am: Intro to GIS with ArcGIS Pro. This workshop will give an overview of how to get up and running with ArcGIS Pro and is suitable for those who are entirely new to GIS.
  • Tuesday November 17, 10–11am: Transition to ArcGIS Pro. This workshop is designed for those who are familiar with ArcGIS Desktop and want to transition to ArcGIS Pro.
  • Wednesday November 18, 2–3pm: Intro to R Spatial Workshop. In this introductory workshop, participants will learn how to use the tmap and dplyr packages in R to manipulate, perform spatial functions, and map spatial data.
  • Thursday November 19, 2–4pm: Using Streetmap Premium. This workshop will give an overview of the Streetmap Premium data product, which provides enriched street data for use in ArcGIS software. Streetmap Premium is available to members of the WashU community; see this LibGuide for more information.
  • Friday November 20, 12–2pm: Intro to QGIS. QGIS is a free and open-source GIS software that is available on a variety of operating systems. This workshop will go over the basics of dealing with vector data.

These events are free and open to all! You can sign up for the workshops and panel discussion here.