GEOG 586 Geographical Information Analysis

• First Day of Class: February21,2024through–February21,2024
• End of Class: May1,2024through–May1,2024

Geography 586 is a required course for students in the Penn State Master of GIS degree program. The course is organized around six weekly projects and a more substantial project pursued through all ten weeks of the course, with milestones through the quarter. Weekly projects include associated readings, quizzes, and discussions about the analysis of spatial data. This is a course in analytical methods for handling specifically spatial data, that is, data where the arrangement of observations in space is thought to be of significance. The techniques introduced are often mathematically complex, but while these aspects are covered in the course, the emphasis is on the choice and application of appropriate methods for the analysis of the spatial data often encountered in applied geography. Weekly projects are hands-on using geographic information systems or other appropriate computational tools so that students appreciate the practical complexities involved and the relative limitations of these methods in contemporary desktop GIS. Through the weekly projects, students acquire familiarity with the use of a single method or family of methods in standard desktop tools, so that they can focus on aspects of that method and develop a thorough understanding of its potential and of its limitations. Problem scenarios range across electoral, demographic, planning, crime analysis, landscape analysis, and other application areas. The course-long project is intended to allow students to formulate a research problem in a topic area of their own choosing, to gather and organize appropriate available datasets, and to understand how a variety of methods among those covered in the course can be applied in combination to thoroughly explore real questions. Students will be asked to engage with their peers' work during the project planning stage. They will also be encouraged to consider developing customized tools to automate repetitive analysis tasks if they have previous programming experience.

• (*) This textbook will also be readily available through the Penn State Libraries E-Book program at no cost to the student. Students do not need to purchase a physical copy of the book. Instructions for accessing the E-Book will be provided in the course.

For the current requirements, please go to: https://handbook.geospatial.psu.edu/node/527

Requires: Students will need a modern spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel, Openoffice.org (free), Calc or similar. GeoDa, freely available exploratory spatial analysis software from the University of Chicago, will also be used in this class and is available here: https://spatial.uchicago.edu/geoda. Students will need a copy of 'R' and 'R Studio,' the statistical software platform. They are freely available from http://cran.r-project.org/ and https://posit.co/, respectively. Students will also need to install several packages for R Studio (all freely available also; specific packages and installation instructions can be found in the Lessons 2 and 3 project materials). In addition to these course materials, you will be using ESRI's ArcGIS Pro 3.x, Spatial Analyst and Geostatistical Analyst software in this course (free to GEOG 586 registered students). See hardware requirement for additional information.