The Harvard Map Collection employs GIS experts, information specialists and librarians who aid our research communities in developing comfort with geospatial data, software, and methods. Our instructional goals are centered on supporting researchers as they learn to bolster their geospatial data skills, including searching for data and scoping projects based on variables such as data availability, timeframes, and computational difficulty. We also provide guidance on software, cartography, data management, spatial analysis, and data cleaning and processing. On this page, please find descriptions of the services through which we deliver this instruction.
Are you teaching a course in which students could benefit from instruction on how to search for geospatial data? Would your humanities course benefit from some hands-on practice with turning archival sources such as maps or census information into analyzable data? Looking for an introductory primer on where to find GIS support on campus?
Our course support ranges from informational drop-ins to librarian-instructor partnerships in which we provide guidance on and deliver the GIS instruction most fruitful for your class.
We make on-going, collaborative project support by way of consultations available for Harvard faculty, postdocs, or thesis students, as well as smaller classes with enrollment of twelve or smaller. Limiting on-going consultations to groups of twelve or smaller helps us ensure delivery of high-quality, hands-on collaborative support.
For larger groups, we will work with you to select instructional workshops and in-class learning activities which best meet your needs. Some of our available workshops include:
We maintain a tutorials and blog site with technical tutorials, as well as example projects we have supported. Some of our most popular posts include: