John A. Olson

Health-Related Geospatial Data and Social Media: Can You Harvest Geosocial Data?

Social media has been at the forefront of everyone’s mind lately. Some of us are still wondering how to leverage and use social media to further our library’s goals in reaching out to our patrons and users, let alone personal goals. But for some researchers, the question has been, “How can we mine these data and harvest the geospatial components to create meaningful datasets for mapping a specific topic or other need?” This has been on my mind as well. This column will begin to explore what is currently available to help mediate, sift, harvest, package, and display these geosocial data. I hope the sources and links shared here will encourage others to explore more deeply how social media data can be harvested and displayed from various outlets. We will focus on searching for health-related data on the Web, determining their currency and assessing the correct level of geography to map it to. Just finding health-related data in this context can be quite a challenge! These health-related data sources will be for specific time periods and are finite in content and size. Conversely, with social media data the content is always growing and moving at a feverish rate, and it is difficult to tease out specific topics related to health. So, let us begin with some of the basic resources first.

Geography, GIS and Gaming: Learning Tools or Just for Fun?

The hot trend in library research of late has been gaming. So what exactly is the connection between games and libraries? you ask. As best I can see . . . not much. The library just happens to be the gathering place where people come together and socialize, learn, communicate, and now, play games. The library is the perfect venue for people to gather and play games because it is one of the central hubs in any community. Within the past two years we have seen the start of an annual gaming day in libraries across the country. These events do not focus on any specific game or games, so all games are fair game. I would also hazard a bet that some of these games have a geography theme. For more on the National Gaming Day for 2011, have a look at their URL: http://ngd.ala.org/ So let us take this in a geographical direction. What can we learn from geography games? What were some of the first geography games and how have they progressed through time? As best as I can determine, the first games with a geography theme were map puzzles created in the late 1700s in England that were used as a teaching tool or learning games for children. Map puzzles are still with us and are very popular, even today. The two examples shown below are from the 1940s and ‘50s. Both have components of shape recognition and orientation to other places in addition to memorizing various facts or statistics about the state or country. Both provide basic geographic skills for learning about other places. Board games are another type of game in which geography plays a role. When you consider the physical object, board games all have a twodimensional surface and have game pieces that move from one space to another on the board. Even if the game does not have a specific geography theme, the board game has basic geographical or spatial relationships to them (Figures 2 and 3).

Which Is It? Scan or Digitize. Make Up Your Mind!

One of my pet peeves is that any time someone is discussing how they are converting paper maps into some electronic format, whether during a conference presentation, a conversation, or while reading an article, the speaker or writer usually says . . ., “We digitized this collection of maps so more people could use them on the web.” Now, I’m assuming the person knows what he or she is talking about, because they are writing the article or speaking to the group seated before them. Somewhere during the presentation though, you realize that the individual is referring to making a digital copy of a paper map and then saving it as a .TIF, .JPG, or .GIF, or as some sort of raster-based file format. To me, this is what you do when you “scan” a map using a scanner. But the speaker keeps calling it “digitizing.” Now, for those of us who work daily with maps and GIS software, digitizing has a distinctly different meaning than scanning does. A BIG difference! Although both convey the meaning that an object is being migrated from some physical format to an electronic one, digitizing focuses on the creation of a digital version by creating x-y coordinates that define points, lines, and polygons that translates the map into a vector file, i.e., .SHP, .DWG or .DXF. Whereas scanning a map renders a digital copy or image of that map as a raster file, I grimace when I hear or read about projects that have “digitized” maps for their website, because I know these items are being scanned as raster images rather than vector files. So how can we correct . . . sorry, I mean, educate those who misuse the terms? Well, let’s check some dictionaries and see how they define the terms “scan” and “digitize.” I think we’ll discover why there might be some confusion. Let’s start with the word scan or scanning. From the Oxford English Dictionary we find that scan is: “To cause (an area, object, or image) to be systematically traversed by a beam or detector; to convert (an image) into a linear sequence of signals in this way for purposes of transmission