Oregon State University helps students amplify storytelling and research with web maps
Mapbox Support Engineer, Rafa Gutierrez recently led four sessions on creating web maps with Mapbox for the map-loving beavers of Oregon State University. We asked Ginny Katz, OSU Doctoral Student and Graduate Research Assistant to tell us more about what’s happening at the OSU GeoViz Lab.
By: Ginny Katz
On February 4th, or “Mapbox Monday” as it came to be known, we invited guest speaker Rafa Gutierrez, Support Engineer at Mapbox, to four different campus events to promote that ‘art of the possible’ with the latest in digital mapping tools. The sessions drew a diverse OSU crowd: geographers, geologists, applied engineers, land cover imagery researchers, epidemiologists, and many other interested geo-data users. Hosted by the OSU Cartography and Geovisualization Lab—aka The GeoViz Lab—these free events are a small part of a new emphasis of open-source web cartography at Oregon State University, led Assistant Professor and Humanistic Geographer, Dr. Bo Zhao.
What’s a web map, you say? It’s a digital map on a website, or embedded into a webpage like an online news story. Often web maps are interactive, meaning you can explore the map at various locations and zoom levels and add in features like pop-ups, custom data, layers you can turn on and off, animations, 3D effects, and more. Web maps are an excellent tool for academics to use to share their research with the public in understandable and meaningful ways.
Cartographers, GIS professionals, data scientists, and journalists are increasingly seeking accessible ways to create data visualizations and interactive tools outside or alongside traditional publications or maps, in order to reach more audiences on the web. This is why Dr. Zhao’s web mapping courses are becoming more popular with students and professionals within the geography department and many other areas of the university. As a supporter of accessible technology and the open-source community, Dr. Zhao offers his lectures and examples on GitHub and encourages his students to choose open-source programs for every aspect of project creation.
Students and faculty from traditionally non-computer science backgrounds come for an eleven-week crash course in web-mapping, front-end programming, and cartographic design and ultimately integrating humanities into digital storytelling. This approach to map design and building encourages students to explore how cartography and web maps can impact people and their decisions. In the mapping course, student projects are typically based on topics that live at the intersection of human and environmental interaction.
This is where Rafa comes in. He was the main attraction in Mapbox Monday’s four events. I teamed up with him in my capacity as The GeoViz Lab student representative, to offer an opportunity for students to learn from a Mapbox expert, to create awareness in the OSU community about an open-source option for web-based data display, and to connect interested researchers directly to a Mapbox resource.
One such connection was with NASA Globe Observer scientist and affiliate professor, Dr. Peder Nelson: “It was a great intro workshop where I was able to create my first MapBox map that includes LandTrendr polygons of change which I then used in deciding where to collect GLOBE Observer photos.”
Thanks to the Mapbox Community team for working with instructors and students across disciplines to connect the classroom to the latest tools Mapbox has to offer. The continued intersection of tech and academic projects is important for the future of web maps and map-creating researchers. The GeoViz Lab is excited about our partnership with the Mapbox Community team and continuing to explore applications of these tools to further geospatial research and scientific storytelling.
Ginny Katz - Graduate Research Assistant - Oregon State University | LinkedIn
The Mapbox Community team is working to inspire and celebrate student projects by offering support on Mapbox tools and bringing the world of web maps into your classrooms and projects. Are you an instructor or student interested in using Mapbox tools? Learn more about how Mapbox can support you.
‘Mapbox Monday’ at the GeoViz Lab was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.