Intro Slide Deck: Introduction to GIS for Public Health (draft)
During week one you will learn how to visualize health data and turn it into meaningful, attractive maps, charts and graphs. This week will cover the basics of visualizing health data and introduce you to a variety of tools and techniques for visualizing your own data. Lectures and hands-on tutorials for developing your own data visualizations. By the end of the week you should feel comfortable working with the tools used with their own datasets.
In preparation for the course, I encourage you do do the following (if you don’t before class it’s ok - this will just save you a bit of time):
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Ensure you have an active Google account. If you do not, please go to Google.com, click on Sign in in the upper right-hand corner, then click on Create an Account on the proceeding page.
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Sign up for an Esri account. Please visit www.arcgis.com, click Sign In in the upper right hand corner, then select Create a Public Account.
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Sign up for a CartoDB account. Please visit www.cartodb.com, click Sign In in the upper right hand corner, then select Create an account.
I would also suggest always bringing a flash drive with you if you’d like to take some of the datasets (and perhaps some of your work) home with you. In most cases these data will be available after class as we’ll be working primarily with Internet-based technologies, but it’s always nice to have a drive with you just in case.
Finally, if you’re looking for a little inspiration prior to the course, check out the following:
Geospatial Revolution: Episode One
Geospatial Revolution: Episode Two, Chapter 3
We’ll also discuss the final project, which you’ll have an opportunity to present to your classmates towards the end of class.
A few examples and resources to get you thinking about your final project:
New York City Restaurant Grades
NYC FRESH Program - Incentivizing Grocery Stores in Underserved Communities
GIS Density Maps of HIV Surveillance Data (Shepard et al. - Paper)
ArcMap Cheat Sheet
Exercise:
Citing a Hospital in Southern California