{"id":32,"date":"2011-03-16T11:49:25","date_gmt":"2011-03-16T15:49:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cliotropic.org\/wip\/?p=32"},"modified":"2011-03-16T12:01:20","modified_gmt":"2011-03-16T16:01:20","slug":"a-brief-note-on-geocommons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/cliotropic.org\/wip\/2011\/03\/16\/a-brief-note-on-geocommons\/","title":{"rendered":"A brief note on GeoCommons"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, <a href=\"http:\/\/digitalhumanities.org\/answers\/\">Digital Humanities Answers<\/a> helped me find an answer to a problem I&#8217;ve been wondering about for a long time: <a href=\"http:\/\/digitalhumanities.org\/answers\/topic\/open-source-historical-gis-tools#post-162\">how to map some data easily,<\/a> without having to know a lot about GIS.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>DHAnswers, a project of the\u00c2\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.ach.org\/\">Association for Computers and the Humanities<\/a> and\u00c2\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/chronicle.com\/blog\/ProfHacker\/27\/\">ProfHacker<\/a>, is a much-better-than-average implementation of the message-board concept, with really smart people who answer questions there. When I saw <a href=\"http:\/\/digitalhumanities.org\/answers\/topic\/open-source-historical-gis-tools#post-222\" target=\"_blank\">Bethany Nowviskie&#8217;s reference <\/a>to <a href=\"http:\/\/geocommons.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">GeoCommons<\/a>, I decided to play with it. (I&#8217;d just listened to an older podcast from the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scholarslab.org\/blog\/\" target=\"_blank\">Scholars&#8217; Lab<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/gisvirginia.blogspot.com\/2009\/11\/neogeography-andrew-turner-uva-gis-day.html\">Andrew Turner&#8217;s<\/a> November 2011 &#8220;<a title=\"Permanent Link to Neogeography: from Tower to Town Hall\" rel=\"bookmark\" href=\"http:\/\/www.scholarslab.org\/podcasts\/neogeography-from-tower-to-town-hall\/\">Neogeography: from Tower to Town Hall<\/a>.&#8221; Andrew is the CTO of GeoCommons, and that talk&#8217;s a good introduction to mapping for non-experts, even if the sound quality&#8217;s not great.)<\/p>\n<p>In any case: if you&#8217;ve ever wondered how to map some data, and especially if you already have a spreadsheet of it with state names, other place names, or latitude\/longitude columns, go play with\u00c2\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/geocommons.com\/\">GeoCommons.<\/a> Once I clean up my maps a little, maybe I&#8217;ll post them here. <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m finding some annoyances with GeoCommons, largely around how it handles date-formatted data, but overall it&#8217;s more useful than frustrating.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, Digital Humanities Answers helped me find an answer to a problem I&#8217;ve been wondering about for a long time: how to map some data easily, without having to know a lot about GIS.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[47,45,46],"class_list":["post-32","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tools-hacking","tag-dhanswers","tag-gis","tag-mapping"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/cliotropic.org\/wip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/cliotropic.org\/wip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/cliotropic.org\/wip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cliotropic.org\/wip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cliotropic.org\/wip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/cliotropic.org\/wip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/cliotropic.org\/wip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cliotropic.org\/wip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cliotropic.org\/wip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}