Trinity thesis student's thesis is online

Devlin Hughes' thesis on the creation of the Smart Choices website is now online here. If you haven't read this yet, or if you don't know anything about Smart Choices, you should check it out. This thesis brings so many things together: digital and educational divide issues, data visualization, mapping, and website design.

Data place

Check out data place to learn how you can create scatterplots using Census data! Data place also has a mapping tool that does not quite beat Social Explorer, but gets pretty close

Trinity folks hard at work, even during break

Dan, Devlin and I presented on our Invisible-Cities-Google-maps-mash-up work at a faculty development workshop the other day. If you look behind us, you can see a map. I think it's the one on problem properties. Look how happy we look...

Of course, the workshop was not all about maps. The first speaker was Tom Deans, from UCONN's Writing Center. He spoke about the classes he teaches where he has students write about/for/with community groups. The distinction between about/for/with is an interesting one, particularly when applied to our cases with google maps. The maps we made in our class were certainly about the community (abandoned properties), for the community in that we hoped people would use the map as a basis for action, and with the community, in that a local organization requested exactly this map!

Places to visit when learning about Google maps mash-ups

There are some must-sees for individuals who haven't had much contact with Google maps mash-ups:

• Google maps mania's fifty things to do with a mash-up: nice overview for thinking of these maps as tools that people can use to accomplish some sort of goal
• Chicago crime: considered the mother of all mash-ups
• Gmaps pedometer: gives a sense of what is to come with mash-ups, because of its topographical features
  

Our project:

• The final result
• Our two tools: YourGMaps and Zeemaps
• The project's aftermath: Jack Dougherty's map for Cities, Suburbs, and Schools and Devlin Hughes' Single Parent Resources in Hartford

Other educational examples:

• Blue Puddle
  

we've been covered

People still remember and notice work our Invisible Cities students conducted over eight months ago. A recent post in the Undercurrents Blog cites our food resources map.

the children of invisible cities

Since we taught Invisible Cities in during the Spring 2006 semester, Google maps mash-up fever spread. We now have a few examples of mash-ups created here at Trinity outside of class that we taught last year. See here, here, and here.