Tutorials: Methods in Spatial Research
View the Project on GitHub CenterForSpatialResearch/methods-in-spatial-research-sp2020
Columbia GSAPP, Spring 2020 Session A
Instructor: Carsten Rodin ccr2139@columbia.edu
TA: Nadine Fattaleh nf2337@columbia.edu
Location: First session in 200 Buell, thereafter 208B Butler (studio@butler)
Methods in Spatial Research introduces key concepts required for work with geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial research in the urban humanities. This is a “making & doing” workshop course and is designed to expand the disciplinary locations in which spatial data analysis takes place. Through hands-on exercises and weekly assignments, participants will develop basic fluency with open-source mapping software, QGIS, methods of data collection and creation, and approaches and concepts in critical spatial analysis and map design.
Methods in Spatial Research is a half-semester, 1.5 credit course offered at GSAPP by the Center for Spatial Research and is open to students from across the Columbia University. Faculty and doctoral candidates may also petition to participate on a non-credit basis. Enrollment is limited by permission of the instructor. Some students will take this course in conjunction with seminar courses offered in other departments. Faculty interested in pairing their course with Methods in to Spatial Research should contact Dare Brawley (dare.brawley@columbia.edu) prior to the start of the semester.
Through completion of the course, participants will:
Two discussion questions on the week’s reading should be uploaded to “Questions” in the Google Drive folder by 6PM Thursdays. Please save these as a plain text file in the format uni_firstnamelastname_weekN.txt (for example, ccr2139_carstenrodin_week2.txt). There are no bad questions, but this page has some good tips for asking better ones.
Each tutorial will have a note in bold at the very end explaining what you’re expected to turn in. If the deliverable is a single file, upload it to the Google Drive under Deliverables > Tutorial N (where N is the number of the week’s exercise) as uni_firstnamelastname_tutorialN. If there are multiple files, first compile them into a .zip and then follow the same convention.
Starting in Week 3, you should be thinking about a theme or topic for a final project. The discussion for that class and the following tutorial will cover how to make your own spatial datasets, both from first-hand observation and archival research. Think about what you might want to document, expose or explore, and how the materials you produce through these two frames of reference could reflect on each other. Week 4 will explore cartographic design principles and we’ll consider the various design choices you’ll face in telling a story about your two datasets. Finally, in Weeks 5 and 6, we’ll look at how to publish your map online and make it interactive. You’ll present your work-in-progress map during our last session before submitting it for review along with a short written reflection.
The course assumes all participants have access to a personal computer, ideally a laptop for in-class tutorials. You will need to download and install both QGIS prior to completing the first tutorial and VS Code for other tutorials later in the semester. Please contact the instructor directly with any issues or questions related to hardware/software.
During the semester, students are encouraged to take advantage of the resources offered by the Lehman Library Map Collection and the Empirical Reasoning Center at Barnard.
This page is both your syllabus and map to all course-related resources. The course schedule can be found below, and contains links to all tutorials. Readings and tutorial datasets can be found in the course folder on Google Drive. In an attempt to keep things simple, we will not be using CourseWorks or any other online materials.
Students from outside GSAPP are welcome to take the course, please follow the instructions provided on this page to register and contact both the instructor and TA with any questions/issues.
This is a discussion and collaborative-critique based course. All students and the instructor must be respectful of others in the classroom. If you ever feel that the classroom environment is discouraging your participation or is problematic in anyway please contact the instructor.
GSAPP is committed to full inclusion of all students. Students needing any form of accommodation due to a disability should speak with the instructor at the beginning of the semester.
Students in all GSAPP courses are expected to uphold the highest levels of academic integrity and abide by the Honor Code and Plagiarism Policy.
In Class: Begin Tutorial 1
Kurgan, Laura. “Mapping Considered as a Problem of Theory and Practice” & “Representation and the Necessity of Interpretation.” In Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics. New York: Zone Books, 2013.
Harley, J. B. “Deconstructing the Map.” Passages, 1992.
Due: Tutorial 1
Corner, James. “The Agency of Mapping.” In Landscape Imagination: Collected Essays of James Corner 1990-2010. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2014.
Couclelis, Helen. “People Manipulate Objects (but Cultivate Fields): Beyond the Raster-Vector Debate in GIS.” In Theories and Methods of Spatio-Temporal Reasoning in Geographic Space, edited by Frank, Campari, and Formentini, 65–77. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1992.
Due: Tutorial 2
Morris, Dee, and Stephen Voyce. “Embodied Mapping, Locative Mapping, and New Media Poetics.” Jacket2, March 20, 2015. (link)
Pavlovskaya, Marianna. “Non-Quantitative GIS.” In Qualitative GIS: A Mixed Methods Approach, 13–38. London: SAGE Publications Ltd, 2009.
Due: Tutorial 3
Monmonier, Mark. How to Lie with Maps, Third Edition. 3 edition. Chicago ; London: University of Chicago Press, 2018.
Desimini, Jill;, and Charles Waldheim. Cartographic Grounds: Projecting the Landscape Imaginary, 2016.
Due: Tutorial 4
Metahaven. White Night before a Manifesto. Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2008.
Shannon Mattern, “Post-It Note City,” Places Journal, February 2020. Accessed 20 Feb 2020. link
Due: Tutorial 5
In-class workshop/discussion of work-in-progress maps.
Project due on Tuesday following.