Hello, everyone!
My name is Rilquer Mascarehas, I am a new Digital Fellow in the Graduate Center starting this semester, and I am really excited to be leading the GIS / Mapping Working Group. A little bit about me and my work: I am a 3rd year PhD Student in the Biology program, working with biogeographic patterns in the Neotropical realm (specially in the Atlantic Forest of Brazil, where I am from). My interested in GIS arose alongside my research: basically all the results we generate are shown as maps, and many of the analyses I have to do are spatial analyses, involving manipulating different types of data in a spatial format.
Since I am new to the group, I was thinking of starting with our biweekly meetings. This way, we could get together and have a feeling of what the group would like to work on for the semester. Our initial scheduled time to meet will be on Fridays, from 5:30pm to 6:30pm. Our first meeting will be on Oct 1st, and they will occur biweekly (the second meeting will be Oct 15th, and so on). Also, check the GCDI Events Calendar to be up to date with all our scheduled meetings (and other events, like our Intro to GIS workshop to happen in November).
In this first meeting, we can talk about a time that would work better for everyone, and update the calendar accordingly. For those beginning with GIS, we will also take this first meeting to cover the basic softwares we can use for mapping, and how to install them and get them running smoothly.
We should all share ideas of tools that we would like to learn throughout the semester, but here are some broad topics I have been thinking: 1) basic mapping concepts; 2) operations and analyses with spatial data; 3) mapping in R.
I will share a zoom link the day prior to our meeting.
Hoping to meet all of you soon!