Celebrate GIS DAY 2020 at UW!

The 22nd GIS Day is coming on November 18th, 2020! Initialized by Esri in 1999, GIS Day is an annual event celebrating the wide use of GIS. On this day, celebrating events will be held by geographers and GIS lovers all over the world.

This year, UW’s Department of Geography will hold an event encouraging people to contribute geographic features of COVID-19 facilities to OpenStreetMap (OSM), the most famous community-based map service in the world. As a free editable map, OSM offers everyone a chance to be a map-maker by allowing users to contribute to the map contents in a timely manner. OSM has been adopted by many big companies including Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook, which means that the crowdsourced data will benefit not only the direct end-users of OSM but also many other users who indirectly use the information from OSM. During this special time of the COVID-19 global pandemic, contributing detailed and up-to-date information to OSM will help those who need to make essential travels complete their trips more quickly and safely, thereby helping flatten the curve.

During the event, a workshop on how to contribute geographical data to OSM will be offered (the workshop material can be found here), and then the participants will contribute COVID-19 relevant public health facilities to OSM. We also prepared prizes for those who make substantial contributions – we have three $50 Amazon Gift Cards for the top 3 contributors in our event.

Please register at https://tinyurl.com/uwgisday2020 and join us on November 18th!

The HGIS lab plans to recruit several student volunteers for an ongoing project to understand how TikTok (a social media video app) serves as an emotional care space for Chinese older people. The completion of this project highly relies on collecting social media data from TikTok, analyzing, and visualizing such a big dataset, and finally, we hope to draw meaningful insights from the empirical study.

The project is currently recruiting undergraduate research assistants to help with data gathering and data analysis. While helping with this project, volunteers will also learn web crawling and hone skills in geospatial big data analysis. Moreover, you will learn how to make sense of social media data using social and critical theories.

The student volunteers need to work with us for 3 hours per week for at least 6 weeks. The professor/supervisor will provide necessary guidance related to data collection, processing, and data visualization. Meeting between the professor/supervisor and the volunteers will be held irregularly based on the project progress and the requests from the students. Ideally, we hope the candidates will have some prior experience in web crawling and python programming. Students who can speak Mandarin are preferred due to the topic of this project is relevant to a Chinese context.

If you are interested in this research opportunity, please contact Dr. Bo Zhao via zhaobo@uw.edu for more information.