Category Archives: spatial humanities

Celebrating GIS Day 2020

About GIS Day

GIS Day is an international celebration of geographic information systems (GIS) technology. The event provides an opportunity for users of geospatial data and tools to build knowledge, share their work, and explore the benefits of GIS in their communities. Since its establishment in 1999, GIS Day events have been organized by nonprofit organizations, universities, schools, public libraries, and government agencies at all levels.

Held annually on the third Wednesday of November, this year GIS Day is officially today. Happy GIS Day! CDVS has participated in Duke GIS Day activities on campus in past years, but with COVID-19, we had to find other ways to celebrate.

A (Virtual) Map ShowcaseThe English Civil Wars - Story Map

To mark GIS Day this year, CDVS is launching an ArcGIS StoryMaps showcase! We invite any students, faculty, and staff to submit a story map to highlight their mapping and GIS work. Send us an email at askdata@duke.edu if you would like to add yours to the collection. We are keen to showcase the variety of GIS projects happening across Duke, and we will add contributions to the collection as we receive them. Our first entry is a story map created by Kerry Rork as part of a project for undergraduate students that used digital mapping to study the English Civil Wars.

Why Story Maps?

If you aren’t familiar with ArcGIS StoryMaps, this easy-to-use web application integrates maps with narrative text, images, and video. The platform’s compelling, interactive format can be an effective communication tool for any project with a geographic component. We have seen a surge of interest in story maps at Duke, with groups using them to present research, give tours, provide instruction. Check out the learning resources to get started, or contact us at askdata@duke.edu to schedule a consultation with one of our GIS specialists.

Introducing Felipe Álvarez de Toledo, 2019-2020 Humanities Unbounded Digital Humanities Graduate Assistant

Felipe Álvarez de Toledo López-Herrera is a Ph.D. candidate at the Art, Art History, and Visual Studies Department at Duke University and a Digital Humanities Graduate Assistant for Humanities Unbounded, 2019-2020.  Contact him at askdata@duke.edu.

Over the 2019-2020 academic year, I am serving as a Humanities Unbounded graduate assistant in Duke Libraries’ Center for Data and Visualization Sciences. As one of the three Humanities Unbounded graduate assistants, I will partner on Humanities Unbounded projects and focus on developing skills that are broadly applicable to support humanities projects at Duke. In this blog post, I would like to introduce myself and give readers a sense of my skills and interests. If you think my profile could address some of the needs of your group, please reach out to me through the email above!

My own dissertation project began with a data dilemma. 400 years ago, paintings were shipped across the Atlantic by the thousands.  They were sent by painters and dealers in places like Antwerp or Seville, for sale in the Spanish colonies. But most of these paintings were not made to last. Cheap supports and shifting fashions guaranteed a constant renewal of demand, and thus more work for painters, in a sort of proto-industrial planned obsolescence.[1]As a consequence, the canvas, the traditional data point of art history, was not a viable starting point for my own research, rendering powerless many of the tools that art history has developed for studying painting. I was interested in examining the market for paintings as it developed in Seville, Spain from 1500-1700; it was a major productive center which held the idiosyncratic role of controlling all trade to the Spanish colonies for more than 200 years. But what could I do when most of the work produced within it no longer exists?

This problem drives my research here at Duke, where I apply an interdisciplinary, data-driven approach. My own background is the product of two fields: I obtained a bachelor’s degree in Economics in my hometown of Barcelona, Spain in 2015 from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and simultaneously attended art history classes in the University of Barcelona. This combination found a natural mid-way point in the study of art markets. I came to Duke to be a part of DALMI, the Duke, Art, Law and Markets Initiative, led by Professor Hans J. Van Miegroet, where I was introduced to the methodologies of data-driven art historical research.

Documents in Seville’s archives reveal a stunning diversity of production that encompasses the religious art for which the city is known, but also includes still lives, landscapes and genre scenes whose importance has been understated and of which few examples remain [Figures 1 & 2]. But analysis of individual documents, or small groups of them, yields limited information. Aggregation, with an awareness of the biases and limitations in the existing corpus of documents, seems to me a way to open up alternative avenues for research. I am creating a database of painters in the city of Seville from 1500-1699, where I pool known archival documentation relating to painters and painting in this city and extract biographical, spatial and productive data to analyze the industry. I explore issues such as the industry’s size and productive capacity, its organization within the city, reactions to historical change and, of course, its participation in transatlantic trade.

This approach has obliged me to become familiar with a wide range of digital tools. I use OpenRefine for cleaning data, R and Stata for statistical analysis, Tableau for creating visualizations and ArcGIS for visualizing and generating spatial data (see examples of my own work below [Figures 3-4]). I have also learned the theory behind relational databases and am learning to use MySQL for my own project; similarly, for the data-gathering process I am interested in learning data-mining techniques through machine learning. I have been using a user-friendly software called RapidMiner to simplify some of my own data gathering.

Thus, I am happy to help any groups that have a data set and want to learn how to visualize it graphically, whether through graphs, charts or maps. I am also happy to help groups think about their data gathering and storage. I like to consider data in the broadest terms: almost anything can be data, if we correctly conceptualize how to gather and utilize it realistically within the limits of a project. I would like to point out that this does not necessarily need to result in visualization; this is also applicable if a group has a corpus of documents that they want to store digitally. If any groups have an interest in text mining and relational databases, we can learn simultaneously—I am very interested in developing these skills myself because they apply to my own project.

I can:

  • Help you consider potential data sources and the best way to extract the information they contain
  • Help you make them usable: teach you to structure, store and clean your data
  • And of course, help you analyze and visualize them
    • With Tableau: for graphs and infographics that can be interactive and can easily be embedded into dashboards on websites.
    • With ArcGIS: for maps that can also be interactive and embedded onto websites or in their Stories function.
  • Help you plan your project through these steps, from gathering to visualization.

Once again, if you think any of these areas are useful to you and your project, please do not hesitate to contact me. I look forward to collaborating with you!

[1]Miegroet, Hans J. Van, and Marchi, ND. “Flemish Textile Trade and New Imagery in Colonial Mexico (1524-1646).” Painting for the Kingdoms. Ed. J Brown. Fomento Cultural BanaMex, Mexico City, 2010. 878-923.

 

Introducing Duke Libraries Center for Data and Visualization Sciences

As data driven research has grown at Duke, Data and Visualization Services receives an increasing number of requests for partnerships, instruction, and consultations. These requests have deepened our relationships with researchers across campus such that we now regularly interact with researchers in all of Duke’s schools, disciplines, and interdepartmental initiatives.

In order to expand the Libraries commitment to partnering with researchers on data driven research at Duke, Duke University Libraries is elevating the Data and Visualization Services department to the Center for Data and Visualization Sciences (CDVS). The change is designed to enable the new Center to:

  • Expand partnerships for research and teaching
  • Augment the ability of the department to partner on grant, development, and funding opportunities
  • Develop new opportunities for research, teaching, and collections – especially in the areas of data science, data visualization, and GIS/mapping research
  • Recognize the breadth and demand for the Libraries expertise in data driven research support
  • Enhance the role of CDVS activities within Bostock Libraries’ Edge Research Commons

We believe that the new Center for Data and Visualization Sciences will enable us to partner with an increasingly large and diverse range of data research interests at Duke and beyond through funded projects and co-curricular initiatives at Duke. We look forward to working with you on your next data driven project!

Fall Data and Visualization Workshops

2017 Data and Visualization Workshops

Visualize, manage, and map your data in our Fall 2017 Workshop Series.  Our workshops are designed for researchers who are new to data driven research as well as those looking to expand skills with new methods and tools. With workshops exploring data visualization, digital mapping, data management, R, and Stata, the series offers a wide range of different data tools and techniques. This fall, we are extending our partnership with the Graduate School and offering several workshops in our data management series for RCR credit (please see course descriptions for further details).

Everyone is welcome at Duke Libraries workshops.  We hope to see you this fall!

Workshop Series by Theme

Data Management

09-13-2017 – Data Management Fundamentals
09-18-2017 – Reproducibility: Data Management, Git, & RStudio 
09-26-2017 – Writing a Data Management Plan
10-03-2017 – Increasing Openness and Reproducibility in Quantitative Research
10-18-2017 – Finding a Home for Your Data: An Introduction to Archives & Repositories
10-24-2017 – Consent, Data Sharing, and Data Reuse 
11-07-2017 – Research Collaboration Strategies & Tools 
11-09-2017 – Tidy Data Visualization with Python

Data Visualization

09-12-2017 – Introduction to Effective Data Visualization 
09-14-2017 – Easy Interactive Charts and Maps with Tableau 
09-20-2017 – Data Visualization with Excel
09-25-2017 – Visualization in R using ggplot2 
09-29-2017 – Adobe Illustrator to Enhance Charts and Graphs
10-13-2017 – Visualizing Qualitative Data
10-17-2017 – Designing Infographics in PowerPoint
11-09-2017 – Tidy Data Visualization with Python

Digital Mapping

09-12-2017 – Intro to ArcGIS Desktop
09-27-2017 – Intro to QGIS 
10-02-2017 – Mapping with R 
10-16-2017 – Cloud Mapping Applications 
10-24-2017 – Intro to ArcGIS Pro

Python

11-09-2017 – Tidy Data Visualization with Python

R Workshops

09-11-2017 – Intro to R: Data Transformations, Analysis, and Data Structures  
09-18-2017 – Reproducibility: Data Management, Git, & RStudio 
09-25-2017 – Visualization in R using ggplot2 
10-02-2017 – Mapping with R 
10-17-2017 – Intro to R: Data Transformations, Analysis, and Data Structures
10-19-2017 – Developing Interactive Websites with R and Shiny 

Stata

09-20-2017 – Introduction to Stata
10-19-2017 – Introduction to Stata 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Data and Visualization Spring 2016 Workshops

Spring 2016 DVS WorkshopsSPRING 2016: Data and Visualization Workshops 

Interested in getting started in data driven research or exploring a new approach to working with research data?  Data and Visualization Services’ spring workshop series features a range of courses designed to showcase the latest data tools and methods.  Begin working with data in our Basic Data Cleaning/Analysis or the new Structuring Humanities Data  workshop.  Explore data visualization in the Making Data Visual class.  Our wide range of workshops offers a variety of approaches for the meeting the challenges of 21st century data driven research.   Please join us!

Workshop by Theme

DATA SOURCES

DATA CLEANING AND ANALYSIS

DATA ANALYSIS

MAPPING AND GIS

DATA VISUALIZATION

* – For these workshops, no prior experience with data projects is necessary!  These workshops are great introductions to basic data practices.

DVS Fall Workshops

GenericWorkshops-01Data and Visualization Services is happy to announce its Fall 2015 Workshop Series.  With a range of workshops covering basic data skills to data visualization, we have a wide range of courses for different interests and skill levels..  New (and redesigned) workshops include:

  • OpenRefine: Data Mining and Transformations, Text Normalization
  • Historical GIS
  • Advanced Excel for Data Projects
  • Analysis with R
  • Webscraping and Gathering Data from Websites

Workshop descriptions and registration information are available at:

library.duke.edu/data/news

 

Workshop
 

Date

OpenRefine: Data Mining and Transformations, Text Normalization
Sep 9
Basic Data Cleaning and Analysis for Data Tables
Sep 15
Introduction to ArcGIS
Sep 16
Easy Interactive Charts and Maps with Tableau
Sep 18
Introduction to Stata
Sep 22
Historical GIS
Sep 23
Advanced Excel for Data Projects
Sep 28
Easy Interactive Charts and Maps with Tableau
Sep 29
Analysis with R
Sep 30
ArcGIS Online
Oct 1
Web Scraping and Gathering Data from Websites
Oct 2
Advanced Excel for Data Projects
Oct 6
Basic Data Cleaning and Analysis for Data Tables
Oct 7
Introduction to Stata
Oct 14
Introduction to ArcGIS
Oct 15
OpenRefine: Data Mining and Transformations, Text Normalization
Oct 20
Analysis with R
Oct 20

 

New Year- New Data and Visualization Lab!

Data and Visualization Services is happy to announce our new Data and Visualization Lab in Duke Libraries new Edge research space.  Located on the first floor of the Bostock Library, the Brandaleone Family Lab for Data and Visualization Services offers a dedicated space for researchers working on data driven projects.

The lab features three distinct areas for supporting data driven research.

Data and Visualization Lab Space

Data and Visualization Lab Computing Zone

Our lab space features twelve high end workstations with dual monitors with the latest software for data visualization, digital mapping, statistics, and qualitative research.  All of the machines have two dedicated displays to encourage collaborative work and data consultations.  Additionally, all twelve machines have a dedicated power port located conveniently under the edge of the table for powering a laptop or usb powered device.

Bloomberg Professional “Bar”

bloom

Since the launch of our Bloomberg terminals, we have seen a steady increase in both individual and team based usage of Bloomberg financial data.  Our three Bloomberg Professional workstations are now located on a dedicated “bar” across from our lab machines.  The  new Bloomberg zone will facilitate collaborate work and provide a base for groups such as the Duke University Investment Club and Duke Financial Economics Center.

Consult and Collaborative SpaceCollaboration Zone

Our third lab space provides a set of four rolling tables for small groups to collaborate or for projects that don’t require a fixed computing space.   An 85″ flat panel display near this zone features data visualizations and other data driven research projects at Duke.

Come See Us!

With ample natural light,  almost 24/7 availability, and a welcoming staff eager to work with you on your next data driven project.  We look forward to working with you in the upcoming year!

Data and GIS Services Spring 2014 Workshop Series

DGSwkshpExplore network analysis, text mining, online mapping, data visualization, and statistics in our spring 2014 workshop series.  Our workshops provide a chance to explore new tools or refresh your memory on effective strategies for managing digital research.  Interested in keeping up to date with workshops and events in Data and GIS?  Subscribe to the dgs-announce listserv or follow us on Twitter (@duke_data).

Currently Scheduled Workshops

 Thu, Jan 9 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM  Data Management Plans – Grants, Strategies, and Considerations

 Mon, Jan 13 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM Webinar: Social Science Data Management and Curation

 Mon, Jan 13 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM Google Fusion Tables

 Tue, Jan 14 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM Open (aka Google) Refine 

 Wed, Jan 15 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM Stata for Research

 Thu, Jan 16 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM Analysis with R

 Tue, Jan 21 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM Introduction to ArcGIS

 Wed, Jan 22 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM ArcGIS Online

 Wed, Jan 22 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM Open (aka Google) Refine 

 Mon, Jan 27 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM Introduction to Text Analysis

 Wed, Jan 29 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM Analysis with R

 Thu, Jan 30 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM Stata for Research

 Mon, Feb 3 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM  Data Visualization on the Web

 Mon, Feb 3 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM  Data Visualization on the Web (Advanced)

 Tue, Feb 11 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM Using Gephi for Network Analysis and Visualization

 Wed, Feb 12 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM Introduction to ArcGIS

 Tue, Feb 18 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM Introduction to Tableau Public 8

 Tue, Feb 25 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM ArcGIS Online

 Thu, Feb 27 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM Historical GIS

 Mon, Mar 3 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM  Designing Academic Figures and Posters

 Tue, Mar 4 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM  Useful R Packages: Extensions for Data Analysis, Management, and Visualization

Announcing the 2014 Student Data Visualization Contest

Student Data Visualization ContestData & GIS Services will soon be accepting submissions to its 2nd annual student data visualization contest.  If you have a course project that involves visualization, start thinking about your submission now!

The purpose of the contest is to highlight outstanding student data visualization work at Duke University. Data & GIS Services wants to give you a chance to showcase the hard work that goes into your visualization projects.

Data visualization here is broadly defined, encompassing everything from charts and graphs to 3D models to maps to data art.  Data visualizations may be part of a larger research project or may be developed specifically to communicate a trend or phenomenon. Some are static images, while others may be animated simulations or interactive web experiences.  Browse through last year’s submissions to get an idea of the range of work that counts as visualization.

The Student Data Visualization Contest is sponsored by Data & GIS Services, Perkins Library, Scalable Computing Support Center, Office of Information Technology, and the Office of the Vice Provost for Research.

For more details, see the 2014 Student Data Visualization Contest page.   Please address all additional questions to Angela Zoss (angela.zoss@duke.edu), Data Visualization Coordinator, 226 Perkins Library.

What’s new in ArcGIS 10?

Basemaps

Would you like to add aerial photography or a topographic map underneath map layers for visual appeal or context? With ArcGIS 10, you can add a basemap to your map project.

A basemap is a link to an online imagery data source. You must be connected to the Internet in order to see a basemap.

Basemaps contain imagery at different levels of detail. When zooming in or out, new imagery will replace old imagery, which provides an approprate level of detail at any zoom level and improves performance by limiting the amount of information to be downloaded and displayed.

 

Export Map Packages

Sharing maps and shapefiles with others can be a pain when a map is composed of many shapefiles and layers.  A map package bundles all shapefiles, layers, and map documents into a single file that can be opened by others with ArcGIS 10.

 

Background Processing

In ArcGIS 10, ArcToolbox tools default to background processing.  This allows you to continue to work while the tool processes your data.

To disable background processing, navigate to the “Geoprocessing Options…” choice under the Geoprocessing Menu Bar, and uncheck the “Enable” box.

 

Search Toolbox Feature

Got a tool you want to use but can’t remember what toolbox its in?  With the Search feature, you can easily locate what you need. Your search term can be the tool name or a close approximation of what you wish to do.

 

Easy to Use Time Data

Time series data became easier to use with ArcGIS 10. Version 10 recognizes time series data with the addition of a single time field.

For example, suppose you have annual precipitation for US cities.  Your data will contain an ID field, a point field, a time field containing the year, and a field containing the precipitation amount.

For more information, see this blog post.

 

How Do I Label Individual Items?

Have you ever wanted to label individudal items on a map, and avoid the cluttered appearance of labels for all features, such as that shown to the right?

ArcGIS 10 hides the tool that you use to label individual items, but it’s easy to get back.

  1. Turn on the “Labeling” toolbar under the Customize Menu Bar.
  2. At the top right corner of the toolbar, click the arrow pointed downward and click “Customize…”
  3. Select the “Commands” tab and select the “Label” category (left panel).
  4. In the right panel, drag the “Label” tool and drop it into any toolbar that you wish.