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;…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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*…
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…
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…
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…
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…