Person:

Guan, Wendy

Without a department of geography, Harvard University established the Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA) in 2006 to support research and teaching of all disciplines across the University with emerging geospatial technologies. In the past four and a half years, CGA built an institutional service infrastructure and unleashed an increasing demand on geographic analysis in many fields. CGA services range from helpdesk, project consultation, training, hardware/software administration, community building, to system development and methodology research. Services often start as an application of existing GIS technology, eventually contributing to the study of geographic information science in many ways. As a new generation of students and researchers growing up with Google Earth and the like, their demand for geospatial services will continue to push CGA into new territories.

WorldMap is a web-based, map-centric data exploration system built on open-source geospatial technology at Harvard University. It is designed to serve collaborative research and teaching, but is also accessible to the general public. This article explains WorldMap's basic functions through several historical research projects, demonstrating its flexible scale (from neighborhood to continent) and diverse research themes (social, political, economic, cultural, infrastructural, etc.). Also shared in this article are our experiences in handling technical and institutional challenges during system development, such as synchronization of software components being developed by multiple organizations; juggling competing priorities for serving individual requests and developing a system that will enable users to support themselves; balancing promotion of the system usage with constraints on infrastructure investment; harnessing volunteered geographic information while managing data quality; as well as protecting copyrights, preserving permanent links and citations, and providing long-term archiving.

This paper examines changes in disaster response and relief efforts and recent web-based geospatial technological developments through an evaluation of the experiences of the Center for Geographic Analysis, Harvard University, of the Sichuan (2008) and Haiti (2010) earthquake responses. This paper outlines how conventional GIS (geographic information systems) disaster responses by governmental agencies and relief response organisations and the means for geospatial data-sharing have been transformed into a more dynamic, more transparent, and decentralised form with a wide participation. It begins by reviewing briefly at historical changes in the employment of geospatial technologies in major devastating disasters, including the Sichuan and Haiti earthquakes (case studies for our geospatial portal project). It goes on to assess changes in the available dataset type and in geospatial disaster responders, as well as the impact of geospatial technological changes on disaster relief effort. Finally, the paper discusses lessons learned from recent responses and offers some thoughts for future development.

This study explores an innovative approach in teaching operational GIS to students who have taken only one introductory GIS course. It brings real world cases into university classrooms and exposes students to practical solutions of multiple scenarios. In the course of 15 weeks, students learn the complete project cycle from problem definition, data review, project planning, to step-by-step operations, including data modeling, procedures automation, visualization, presentation and reporting. The class forms teams to solve network logistic routing for an emergency relief operation, design a geodatabase for a municipal GIS department, and perform 3D modeling for a campus solar radiation analysis.

The design of the course allows students to learn the skills needed for solving all three cases in class, while focusing on one of the cases for hands-on work in lab hours and take-home assignments. The combination of lectures, demos, student presentations and class discussions provides an engaging environment for all students. Guest lecturers from the case sponsoring organizations bring real world experience and scenarios into the classroom, enriching students’understanding of the problems and making sure that the classroom solutions are indeed operationally sound. Such a course becomes the students’ training ground and the case sponsoring organizations’problem solving test bed.

This article discusses an opportunity to engage in new forms of collaborative research made possible by widespread access to the web and mapping technologies. While throughout history there have been references of various types to locations on the earth, very little has been organized in a way to support even simple spatial search or visualization on maps, let alone collaboration. Factors which hinder such geospatial collaboration will be suggested along with thoughts for moving forward. AfricaMap, a public online mapping project under development at Harvard, will be explored for ideas and lessons. Finally, a series of new tools is envisioned to push online collaboration to a more productive state of practice for researchers in all disciplines.

Founded in 1818, the Harvard Map Collection (HMC) is the oldest map collection in America, holding 400,000 maps, more than 6,000 atlases and thousands of reference books. HMC has a strong commitment to digital resources and manages the Harvard Geospatial Library, a foundation for geospatial data service at Harvard. The Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University (CGA) was founded in 2006, independent of the library system, to serve the entire university. This article presents the history, organizational structure, and operational model of CGA and HMC, reviews achievements, lessons learned, suggests future improvements, and reviews GIS-related medical research at Harvard.

The Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA) at Harvard University supports research and teaching that relies on geographic information. This includes supporting geographic analysis for public health research at Harvard. This article reviews geographic concepts that apply to public health, pertinent data available in geographic format, and GIS analytical techniques. The work-flow methodology the CGA has developed for conducting research with geographic data will be presented, highlighting successful practices to follow and pitfalls to avoid. Applications of this work flow are illustrated through an in-depth discussion of specific case studies in public health research at the university.

WorldMap is an open source online mapping application which aims to lower barriers for scholars who wish to visualize, analyze, organize, present, and publish mapped information. In late 2013, 290 respondents among the 8,000 registered users participated in an online survey in which they described their activities, purposes, experiences, and preferences regarding the system. Participants also described their professional background, GIS skill level, age, gender, and country of work. This study analyzes the results of the survey, by summarizing the responses to each question independently and by examining the relationships and dependencies of these answers across the different questions to try to better understand why users responded the way they did. The study is based on the user-centered design (UCD) approach. We aim to use the survey results to improve our understanding of user demographics and needs. Findings from this study will be used to guide WorldMap improvements, and we hope the findings will also shed light on the broader requirements of online GIS users.

Human migration has been an important activity in human societies since antiquity. Since 1890, approximately three percent of the world’s population has lived outside of their country of origin. As globalization intensifies in the modern era, human migration persists even as governments seek to more stringently regulate flows. Understanding this phenomenon, its causes, processes and impacts often starts from measuring and visualizing its spatiotemporal patterns. This study builds a generic online platform for users to interactively visualize human migration through space and time. This entails quickly ingesting human migration data in plain text or tabular format; matching the records with pre-established geographic features such as administrative polygons; symbolizing the migration flow by circular arcs of varying color and weight based on the flow attributes; connecting the centroids of the origin and destination polygons; and allowing the user to select either an origin or a destination feature to display all flows in or out of that feature through time. The method was first developed using ArcGIS Server for world-wide cross-country migration, and later applied to visualizing domestic migration patterns within China between provinces, and between states in the United States, all through multiple years. The technical challenges of this study include simplifying the shapes of features to enhance user interaction, rendering performance and application scalability; enabling the temporal renderers to provide time-based rendering of features and the flow among them; and developing a responsive web design (RWD) application to provide an optimal viewing experience. The platform is available online for the public to use, and the methodology is easily adoptable to visualizing any flow, not only human migration but also the flow of goods, capital, disease, ideology, etc., between multiple origins and destinations across space and time.