Mapping Opportunity, Equity for Spatial Justice Using Open Data and Free Geographic Information Science (GIS) Software

Social science has documented ways that equal opportunity, equity and social justice are a function of spatial justice. Since the days of the London poverty surveys and Settlements, social workers have been using maps as a key analytic tool in a community assessment. Applications for mapping include finding optimal locations for services, outreach or policy change. In recent times, the social indicators movement has led to networks of professionals and researchers in different communities to collaborate and exchange ideas on managing information about place. While some social workers may also be trained geographers, often we have only the time to learn the most basic concepts about geographic information science (GIS). The purpose of this workshop is to expose researchers to intuitive web based and desktop solutions for analysis that may be used for a community assessment, classroom use, or research. The first part of the workshop workshop will show users the latest sources for online mapping and data such as ESRI's ArcGIS Online and Socrata's open data portal. The second part of the workshop appeals to social work researchers working with point and polygon data that requires some analysis or has private information that cannot be displayed on an open website. Polygon data often takes the form of aggregate characteristics of a census tract or zip code (e.g. Freisthler et al., 2004). This workshop will also show how to join a table of information for zip codes, census tracts, cities, counties or states so that they may those data may be displayed graphically or analyzed using QGIS, a free and open source desktop GIS client. Participants will learn how to take data downloaded from the internet, load that into QGIS and perform basic analysis. Examples of analysis include display of descriptive statistics such as quantiles, drawing a buffer around a point, and calculating distances. The third part of the workshop, is for social work researchers who need to analyze point data, like location of services or crime hotspots. I will show how to create generalized trends to mask the precise location of individual crimes in interest of balancing knowledge and ethics around privacy. The workshop will be primarily a demonstration. The instructors will give attendees a chance to install QGIS, and workshop data on their laptops so people may follow along. The workshop does not assume prior knowledge of GIS. The workshop will be interactive and provide an opportunity for colleagues to share research and take requests on how to solve geographic problems with their data.