Materials for the GESIS workshop "Advanced Geospatial Data Processing for Social Scientists"
Dennis Abel (dennis.abel@gesis.org) & Stefan Jünger (stefan.juenger@gesis.org)
A growing interest in economics and the social sciences in Earth observation (EO) data has led to a broad thematic spectrum of publications in recent years. They range from studying environmental attitudes and behavior, economic development, conflicts and causes of flight, and electoral behavior. However, working with EO data requires advanced knowledge of geospatial data processing. Social science researchers face many obstacles in applying and using these data, resulting from 1) a lack of technical expertise, 2) a lack of knowledge of data sources and how to access them, 3) unfamiliarity with complex data formats, such as high-resolution, longitudinal raster datacubes, and 4) a lack of expertise in integrating the data into existing social science datasets. After all, despite the increased interest in the data, for the majority of researchers in the social sciences, complex geospatial data derived from remote sensing represents a black box.
This course aims to address this gap. We will focus on data access from large databases via APIs, data wrangling of raster data and datacubes, and introduction of workflow for data integration with users' datasets, such as survey data. This course is advanced and suitable for students and scientists who feel familiar with R and have some basic knowledge of working with geodata.
This page comprises the official workshop repository with the most recent changes
to our materials. You can find all the course data, slides, and exercises here.
The section below links the slides and exercises that will open them directly in
the browser as HTML files. They are also stored in the folders ./slides/ and
./exercises. You can also find all the data in the folder ./data.