Introductory Lab

• Lab:

  This lab is designed to introduce you to some tools that you may need as you proceed through the modules of our course, as well as to get you started collecting data that we will need for practice purposes. We want you to get organized and be efficient, and these tools are provided to help you do just that.

  If possible, pair up for this exercise: two heads are better than one, and more likely to find that silly mistake. Each of you should work on your own computer, but at least you'll have a shoulder to cry on.

  By the end of this lab you should have

  • played with WinZip, and understand compression better;
  • downloaded data
    • census data for Illinois, and
    • French flu data;
  • practiced compressing and uncompressing files;
  • created a simple home page for the web;
  • translated an image between different formats; and
  • played a web-based game to test your understanding of simple spatial autocorrelation.

  Wow! All that in 2 hours? We'd better get going. Follow the links....

  1. Compression: on the value of keeping files compressed.

  2. Everyone will be needing a place to store their data and results for this course, and we might as well use a directory which can serve as the basis for a class "home page". This site will be a repository of useful information, data, results, and, hopefully, your final project. If you already have a home page, then you use that directory instead of the one the rest of us will be using here at the University of Michigan.

     Students at U of M will need a UNIX account: we will be using space in that account to create the home page. You may have one already, and not know it. If you have the icon "My IFS Home Directory" on the desktop, or if you can logon to a UNIX machine (e.g. login.itd.umich.edu), then you're okay. If not, contact Andy to arrange for an account, and create a local directory for the rest of this lab.

     The IFS UNIX file account at the U of M is accessible from the desktop of your Windows machine once you login, and its files and directories can be treated just like the other files and directories under Windows.

     Web intro: Your course home page.

  3. Finding and downloading files and spatial data on the web should become second nature to you. Finding data is sometimes easy, and sometimes a problem. We've compiled some data sources for you that are of particular interest to this class. Often we begin a data search by firing up a search engine such as Google. As for downloading, it is now easy, using the ftp (file transfer protocol) built into your browser: just click!

     We're going to collect two data sets.

  4. Web-ware - play Daniel Griffith's Spatial Autocorrelation Game to test your understanding of this important concept. At this point you should recall that spatial autocorrelation characterizes clustering, as Mark presented in the slide show accompanying this module.

     Explain your methods for attaining the extremes to your partner. Replace the matrix generated by the machine with one of your own, which shows extreme spatial autocorrelation. You might want to print off a copy of the extreme cases, so you'll remember them.

  5. Please evaluate this lab! We'd like to improve our labs, and value your suggestions.

• Software: Web Browser, WinZip, TransImage, Notepad.

• Featured techniques: data downloading and decompression; simple beginning web page; a look at Spatial Autocorrelation.

• Readings:
  Principal Readings:
  1. Gatrell, A. C. and M. Loytonen. 1998. GIS and Health Research: an Introduction. In: GIS and Health (Eds. A. C. Gatrell and M. Loytonen). Taylor and Francis, pp. 3-16. (some high points)
  2. Gesler, Wil. 1986. The Uses of Spatial Analysis in Medical Geography: a Review. Soc. Sci. Med. 23:10, pp. 963-973. (some high points)
  Reference Readings:
  1. English, D. 1996. Geographical epidemiology and ecological studies. In: Geographical and Environmental Epidemiology (Eds. Elliott et al.). Oxford University Press.

• Data:
  • Illinois census data, by county (as a zip file);
  • French Flu Data (as a gz file), originally from Sentiweb.

• Links:
  • If you haven't checked these out yet, do! They're fun.
    • The Plague
    • Virtual Museum of Anesthesiology Portrait: John Snow. The CDC has also honored Snow.
    • The 1918 Influenza Pandemic

  • Spatial and Temporal Analysis of Epidemiological Data. This is one paper from a series at this URL. Here's a local version.
  • 'When I did some pro-bono work in visualizing and animating AIDS mortality on a county-by-county, week-by-week basis, the data was required by CDC to be "corrupted" by averaging over a 12-week "boxcar" and eliminating any county with less than a threshold number of counts.' Cheers, Rob Lake.
  • Census data: available by ftp, by state. Hint: "places" files under a particular state give exhaustive census data for each city/town in the state, in ascii, comma-delimited format.... more general data is also available for the USA. As usual, these files chew up disk space at light speed, so watch out.
  • Notes from Ellen K. Cromley's (UConn) Workshop GIS and epidemiology of infectious disease in San Diego.
  • HTML assistance, for you home page designers.

Page by Andy Long. Comments appreciated.