Geospatial Data, Maps & Spatial Analysis

R Geospatial Fundamentals: Parts 1-3

March 11, 2024, 9:00am
Geospatial data are an important component of data visualization and analysis in the social sciences, humanities, and elsewhere. The R programming language is a great platform for exploring these data and integrating them into your research. This workshop focuses on fundamental operations for reading, writing, manipulating and mapping vector data, which encodes location as points, lines and polygons.

R Geospatial Fundamentals: Vector Data: Parts 1-2

October 29, 2021, 12:00pm
Geospatial data are an important component of data visualization and analysis in the social sciences, humanities, and elsewhere. The R programming language is a great platform for exploring these data and integrating them into your research. This workshop focuses on fundamental operations for reading, writing, manipulating and mapping vector data, which encodes location as points, lines and polygons.

R Geospatial Fundamentals: Vector Data, Parts 1-2

March 7, 2022, 10:00am
Geospatial data are an important component of data visualization and analysis in the social sciences, humanities, and elsewhere. The R programming language is a great platform for exploring these data and integrating them into your research. This workshop focuses on fundamental operations for reading, writing, manipulating and mapping vector data, which encodes location as points, lines and polygons.

R Geospatial Fundamentals: Raster Data

February 23, 2023, 10:00am
Geospatial data are an important component of data visualization and analysis in the social sciences, humanities, and elsewhere. The R programming language is a great platform for exploring these data and integrating them into your research. This workshop focuses on fundamental operations for reading, writing, manipulating and mapping raster data, which typically represents geographic information in a grid of regular sized cells.

R Census Data Wrangling and Mapping

April 1, 2022, 10:00am
Since 1790, the US Census has been THE source of data about American people, providing valuable insights to social scientists and humanists. Mapping these data by census geographies adds more value by allowing researchers to explore spatial trends and outliers. This workshop will introduce three key packages for streamlining census data workflows in R: tigris, tidycensus and tmap. Participants will learn how to download census tabular data for one or more geographic aggregation units or years, download the associated census geographic data and then join these data for analysis and mapping.

Geospatial Fundamentals with QGIS: Parts 1-2

February 1, 2022, 3:00pm
This workshop will introduce methods for working with geospatial data in QGIS, a popular open-source desktop GIS program that runs on both PCs and Macs as well as linux computers. Participants will learn how to load, query and visualize point, line and polygon data. We will also introduce basic methods for processing spatial data, which are the building blocks of spatial analysis workflows. Coordinate reference systems and map projections will also be introduced.

Geospatial Fundamentals with QGIS: Parts 1-2

September 17, 2021, 10:00am
This workshop will introduce methods for working with geospatial data in QGIS, a popular open-source desktop GIS program that runs on both PCs and Macs as well as linux computers. Participants will learn how to load, query and visualize point, line and polygon data. We will also introduce basic methods for processing spatial data, which are the building blocks of spatial analysis workflows. Coordinate reference systems and map projections will also be introduced.

R Geospatial Fundamentals: Vector Data, Parts 1-2

April 5, 2022, 2:00pm
Geospatial data are an important component of data visualization and analysis in the social sciences, humanities, and elsewhere. The R programming language is a great platform for exploring these data and integrating them into your research. This workshop focuses on fundamental operations for reading, writing, manipulating and mapping vector data, which encodes location as points, lines and polygons.

Valentina Flores

Data Science for Social Justice Fellow 2024
Berkeley Law's Jurisprudence and Social Policy Ph.D. Program

Valentina Flores is a first-year graduate student at Berkeley Law's Jurisprudence and Social Policy (JSP) Ph.D. Program. They hold a joint Political Science and Human Rights Bachelor of Arts (BA) Degree from Bard College. Before JSP, Valentina worked at various criminal justice nonprofits, most notably as an editorial Fellow for PEN America’s Prison and Justice Writing program.

Valentina has written about how practices of punishment and surveillance erode the civil rights of the formerly incarcerated and is broadly interested in spatial racism,...

Sand Mining - Plugging a Critical Data Gap

May 14, 2024
Suraj Nair
by Suraj Nair. Excessive sand mining is causing a global ecological crisis. In this blog post, I present why sand mining is one of the most pressing challenges facing the planet, and why persistent data gaps hinder accountability and monitoring. I also discuss an ongoing research project of mine where we combine freely available satellite imagery and machine learning models to build open-source sand mine detection tools that can plug some of these data gaps.