Category: community-engagement

Student GIS Projects

~ mwiniski ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been teaching the Introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) class in the Earth, Environmental, and Sustainability Sciences (EESS) Department for about 11 years. Suresh Muthukrishnan (department chair) also teaches the course. I’ve learned a ton from him. Here are some things I really enjoy about teaching the course:

House flipping hotspots near the Cincinnati Streetcar route. An example map from student Charlotte Moore.
  • Interdisciplinary Nature – Students from across campus take the course. Of course, there are lots of EESS majors. However, even those projects run the gamut. Projects like geologic mapping, landslide risk, sustainable farming, and even mapping data from GPS collars on mountain lions. But students of history, economics, sociology, computer science, business, and music also come up with some great projects.
  • The Opportunity to Learn – Every semester, students will come up with novel questions and methods. I think my typical response is, “I haven’t done that before, but I know it’s possible. Let’s figure it out together.” So I learn something new about GIS, as well as all the topics above, each time I teach.
  • Community Connections – Many of the projects involve community partners–folks like the Greer Police Department, Upstate Warrior Solution (which serves veterans), Greenlink (our public transportation department), local land conservation non-profits, the forestry department, and community associations. Our first deep partnership involved mapping streetlights, which I’ll talk about in another post.
  • Working with Our Post-Baccalaureate Fellows (postbacs) – I’m grateful to get to work with two recent Furman graduates who are on our team. Catherine Lippert (Sustainability Science) and Sam Hayes (History and Politics and International Affairs) are an integral part of teaching the course. They have serious GIS chops and roll up their sleeves to help the students with projects, every step of the way.
  • Project-Based Learning – The course involves a semester-long project. It’s a real challenge to teach GIS principles, create meaningful labs, AND support students as they use these concepts and tools to apply what they’ve learned to address a real-world problem. Every semester I think, “We took on too much. This isn’t going to happen.” But it always comes together. Here’s the syllabus for the class.
An historic, georeferenced map of Charleston Harbor (1711). From a student project by Kylie Gambrill.

Here are some examples from a recent class. I don’t want to make it seem like I’m taking credit for these. The students did the work. Catherine, Sam, and I were teammates. However, the examples are illustrative of the range of projects that are possible. The projects are easier to share, now that we have switched the delivery format from poster presentations to StoryMaps.

Charlotte Moore: Transit-Motivated Gentrification: An analysis of gentrification in Over-the-Rhine, especially as a result of the Cincinnati Streetcar.

Caroline Vickery: Contextualizing Upstate Farms: A preliminary examination of land use and nutrient loading for small farms in the Upstate of South Carolina.

Kylie Gambrill: Understanding Change: The Charleston Harbor — Our perceptions of the environment around us depend upon the cultural context we find ourselves in.

Bennett Dean: Affordable housing and public transportation in Greenville.

 Chloe Sandifer-Stech: Recommendations for green space around Enoree Career Center: A study of the influence of tree density on carbon storage.

Jake Gerardi: Land Sparing/Sharing Impacts on Birds: Assessing habitat quality of southern bird species using ecological principles in Greenville watersheds.

Madison Eichhorn: Affordable Housing & Good Jobs – An evaluation of proximity, density, and availability of affordable housing and employment.

Austyn Feigenbaum: Boating Safety Zones and Florida Manatees: An investigation on the relationship between manatee death rates and boating safety zones along the coast of Florida.

I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing the range of student projects and learning more. It’s a pleasure to see all the hard work result in such great studies and stories.

Reflecting on Projects

~ mwiniski ~ Leave a comment

Partnership with United Way of Greenville County: Neighborhood Assessment

Percent Unemployment: Greenville County and Ten Focus Neighborhoods.

I’ve been going through the course, Visualization for Clarity, on the FlowingData website. I’ve learned a great deal and decided to use it as an opportunity to go back through previous work and projects to analyze what we did right and what we could have done differently. 

  1. Firstly, I wanted to put highlights from the projects in one place. Some of these resources are difficult to find. So I wanted to pull them together in one place. So that’s a question for action: How do we make our work easier to find, so that the information can be leveraged for positive change? See the full report and executive summary for details on this project.
  2. I hope this exercise will prompt me to reflect on our work. I say ‘our’ because almost all of the work I’ve done has been with teams. Although I like to hole up and make maps and other visualizations myself (usually playing punk music and drinking homemade cold-brew coffee), I love working in teams. Part of it is selfish; I just learn so much by working with others.
  3. The last reason is professional. It’s difficult to share this kind of work in a CV/Resume. I want to get it out there–get feedback from a broader audience and connect more deeply with a GIS / DataViz community.

So here’s one from the recent past.

Project Title: Focused Needs and Assets Assessment – Greenville County, SC

Team members: See the list in the report. It was a big, team effort. 

Violent Crime in Ten Study Neighborhoods: Data from Greenville Police Department.

Summary: 

  • We focused on 10 neighborhoods with the highest family poverty rates in Greenville County. This focus was determined in collaboration with the United Way of Greenville County. 
  • We then sent teams of qualitative researchers, including students, into these neighborhoods to better understand assets and needs. That team met with 268 neighborhood stakeholders! We wanted to make sure to focus on assets just as much, or more, than needs. As you can probably guess, these varied greatly from neighborhood to neighborhood.
  • Our team mapped and graphed 35 measures of community well-being, highlighting each of the ten neighborhoods. 
  • Because of United Way’s focus on a cycle of success, particularly third-grade reading scores, our team re-aggregated the data to local school attendance zones to analyze explanatory variables for reading scores. See the full report or executive summary. The most interesting one to me was the potential role in communities with high alternative workshift rates (e.g., second-shift, third-shift, etc.). Professor John Quinn took the lead on this analysis. 

Tools used for visualizations, maps, and modeling:

  • ArcGIS Desktop
  • QGIS
  • R
  • Tableau
Financial Measures Broken Down by Neighborhood and Tract Number. Darker Green Shows Higher Percentage or Dollar Amount.

Visualization Reflection:

The good

  • I think we did a great job with maps and visuals, e.g., color choices, visual hierarchy, highlighting local landmarks, and other map-making best practices.
  • I also like the tables for the measures of well-being (see above). Sometimes tables are better than a fancy visualization. This is a good example. The color shading in the table really draws the eye towards certain neighborhoods.
  • I really like the asset and need visualizations in the executive summary (see below). This was Dr. Matt Cohen’s idea. We implemented that with Tableau.
Community Assets. Identified by Community Members and Stakeholders.

Opportunities for Improvement:

  • Interactivity – It drives me a bit crazy when great information isn’t interactive. We locked this into PDF format for the report. In our defense, we had limited time and budget, so we decided not to pursue interactive platforms like Tableau Server and ArcGIS Online. We fixed that in future projects. How cool would it have been to have to be able to hover over a particular neighborhood and see it highlighted in our box and whisker plot? I could do that in Tableau Desktop, but it would have been helpful for our stakeholders to do that too. 
  • Updatability – We put a lot of work into pulling data in tabular form, cleaning it up, re-aggregating it to non-standard boundaries. Now the data is stale. We need to take a step back and explore ways to develop frameworks that allow us to “slide” new data underneath (like new ACS estimates) and have maps and graphs auto-update.