Tofurkey Map Wrap-up

Thanks to all of you who participated in this year’s Tofurkey Map! 259 Smithies contributed their Thanksgiving break destination to the map.  Here’s a few fast facts compiled by SAL Assistant Ellen Sulser ’18: Most popular dishes: (1) Stuffing – 42 respondents; (2) Mashed potatoes – 34 respondents; (3) TIE: Pumpkin pie and Turkey (34 respondents each) […]

Post-election Media Monitoring + Mapathon

This Monday, 11/21, the Spatial Analysis Lab is hosting a Media Monitoring + Mapathon event to support a crowd-sourced map of post-election harassment incidents across the country.  Volunteers will look through reports of harassment incidents in traditional media and public social media sources, locate the events on a map, and fill out a form of information […]

Third Annual Tofurkey Map

Are you flying across the world for Thanksgiving break? Or maybe you’re not planning to leave your dorm for five days? In either case, we hope that you’ll contribute to this year’s Tofurkey Map, a tradition started by former Post-Bac Fellow Victoria to document where and how Smithies are spending the holiday!

Drone Course – January 2017

The Interterm 2017 Drone Course will offer students an opportunity to learn about drone technology with a focus on mapping and image analysis to support conversation efforts.   In addition to gaining an understanding of the technology, students will learn how to fly drones safely, legally, and responsibly in the national and public airspace. The course […]

Bringing back hand-drawn maps (or, how to be a hipster cartographer)

Two weeks ago, I attended the annual conference of the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS) in Colorado Springs as part of our ongoing efforts to integrate design thinking into how we teach cartography at Smith.  Attendees come from all corners of the cartography world: from illustrators of fictional maps to developers of map-based mobile applications.  As […]

October Mystery Map Solution

Only one person submitted a guess to our latest Mystery Map competition.  Amazingly enough, this guess was correct for all three variables, so congratulations – again – to Sam Masinter!  Here are the winning answers:   Variable A: number of scientific* Nobel Prizes per country Variable B: number of universities per country (see this link for […]

First Mystery Map of the Year!

We’re excited to release the first Mystery Map of the 2016-17 academic year! We had plans to create one much earlier in the year, but we’ve been so busy that it feels like we blinked on Labor Day and woke up in mid-October.  Check out the map by clicking on the image below.  When you […]

Update: When In Rome

Our most loyal readers may remember that we announced a collaborative project with the Smith College Museum of Art back in March.  We set off last semester to create a Story Map for their autumn exhibition, When In Rome: Prints & Photographs, 1550-1900.  In addition to serving as a public, digital archive of the exhibition, […]

Upcoming Projects in the SAL

In addition to our regular workshops and the ten classes we plan to work with this semester, the SAL staff have some exciting projects on the plate for this fall!   Drones Back in June, the FAA announced new regulations on drone flying that went into effect on August 29. The new rules make it much easier for […]

Summer science classes in the SAL

For four weeks during July and August, the SAL was abuzz with activity as dozens of high-school students designed web maps on topics ranging from local geology to bird migrations in East Asia.  We worked with three different classes in the high school summer programs this year: Anne Wibiralske’s Field Studies in Sustainability class, Ethan […]