Open Scholarship

My final project for this seminar will be the creation of an asset map of downtown Allentown using QGIS.  For the last two years I have taught students ArcGIS in order to complete a class assignment that requires them to analyze spatial inequalities in downtown Allentown.  For example, one group of students mapped the availability of fresh vs. fast food as they considered issues of childhood obesity and the SNAP.  This project has proven to be challenging as students have limited access to ArcGIS and are  not able to use the program outside of a campus computer lab, limiting their learning experience.  Using QGIS, along with other gps programs, will allow us to more easily and accurately map existing infrastructure and analyze this information in conjunction with primary and secondary data sets.  I envision working with the existing data this spring as a test run for class.