Do you have data that needs to be displayed on a map?

The eResearch team at the University of Western Sydney and its partner, Intersect, are flying in experts from Melbourne University to run a series of workshops designed for postgraduate students and academics.

This event will be a series of short workshops on how to turn cultural and communications research into physical and interactive maps using CartoDB and TileMill.

What will I learn?

Participants will learn all the skills to make a beautiful map; from making their data geospatially compliant through to using a cartography formatting language to tell a story with the map.

Each participant will walk away with the ability to produce beautiful visual maps for their research papers, for their presentations, and even publishing interactive maps on their own website.

Who should come?

The first three workshops will be aimed at postgraduate students and academics (we estimate about up to 20 people). NB: We welcome anyone from NSW: industry, other Universities and anyone interested in learning more about these mapping tools. The final workshop is aimed at technical support people and trainers.

When and how will these workshops happen?

There will be four workshop sessions (3 hours each) plus an optional session to teach participants how to format their data so it can be wrangled into a map and then stylised to highlight the map with various cartography techniques, so as to help ‘tell the story’ of the research and its data.

About the Trainers

Steve Bennett has extensive experience providing tools and training to researchers in both government and academia. Prior to joining the University of Melbourne’s ITS Research Services team, he led data management projects at VeRSI (now V3 Alliance), working with researchers from a wide range of disciplines. An open data enthusiast, Steve has contributed extensively to projects such as Open Street Map and Wikipedia and he is the driving force behind Melbourne’s DataHack meetup group. He has run mapping workshops for The University of Melbourne and Deakin University and his mapping projects have featured on the ABC and The Age. Steve believes that everyone needs maps.

Fiona Tweedie was until recently a research and policy officer for the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission, before joining the University of Melbourne’s ITS Research Services group. As a research community manager for the humanities and social sciences, she is helping to build communities of researchers around tools including Tilemill and CartoDB. With a PhD in Roman history, she knows first hand the need for researchers to produce maps for themselves, and has created her own maps showing patterns of Roman colonisation. She is also an ambassador for the Open Knowledge Foundation, leading the organisation of the Victorian branch of GovHack 2014, a nationwide open data hackfest taking place in July.

When

Monday 21 July Workshops 1 & 2

Tuesday 22 July Workshops 3 & 4

Where

All workshops will be held at UWS’s Parramatta South Campus. Building EB, Level 3, Room 36

Workshop details

Workshop 1: Monday 21 July, 9.30am-12.30pm
CartoDB (visualisation of data on a map, useful to many researchers)

Workshop 2: Monday 21 July, 1.30pm-4.30pm
Introduction to TileMill (basic cartography)

Workshop 3: Tuesday 22 July, 9.30am-12.30pm
Advanced TileMill (working with data to create a complete custom basemap)

Workshop 4: Tuesday 22 July, 1.30pm-4.30pm
Building TileMill servers and technical briefings.

Cost

Free for attendees

RSVP

Friday 11 July to: http://bit.ly/1nIYnD7