Workshop to Teach Southern California Social Workers GIS Skills

New Urban Research Inc. is hosting a one-day workshop to help communities use geographic information systems. The workshop, titled "Mapping Southern California Communities: An Introduction to GIS and Community Analysis" is being held July 13th, 14th and 15th at the New Horizon's Computer Learning Center in San Diego so participants can choose which day they want to attend. The cost for the workshop is $399 and checks, credit cards and purchase orders are accepted.

The event is targeted toward teaching social service providers, planners and researchers with no prior experience with GIS the fundamentals. Participants will learn about three key components of GIS: thematic mapping, geocoding (address mapping) and spatial querying.

Materials for the workshop include a comprehensive 75-page workbook that includes the presentation, exercises and reference worksheets, ArcGIS (ArcView 9.0) software 30-day trial CD set, access to new 2004 Tiger/Line geography files (already converted to shapefiles) which include streets, zip codes, school districts, voting districts, census tracts and many other useful data sets.

The Mapping Southern California Communities workshop will teach participants:

• The fundamentals of using ArcGIS (ArcView 9.0) the leading GIS software,
• How to thematically map and analyze a wide variety of Census data such as income, race, language and housing data (including how to download data from the Census),
• How to map addresses such as those of clients, volunteers, campaign donations and social service facilities as well as to identify gaps in coverage areas by zip code and other geographies,
• Best practices of creating informative and well designed maps for public dissemination. Class participants will review and critique several maps in an attempt to learn good map design,
• Where to get a wide selection of free geography files including new 2004 Tiger/Lines including streets, zip codes and all Census geography.
  
  Workshop Agenda
  
  Lesson 1
  Learn the basic functions of ArcGIS;
  Setting up ArcMap;
  Adding data and geography layers;
  Working with Layouts;
  
  Lesson 2
  Introduction to American Factfinder;
  Downloading Census and American Community Survey data to map;
  Downloading free geography files including tracts, zip codes, blocks and several others;
  Preparing Census tract data in Excel to import into ArcGIS;
  
  Lesson 3
  Joining data and geography files;
  Creating thematic (color shaded) maps to display data;
  Working with legends and interval breaks;
  
  Lesson 4
  How to do common spatial queries;
  
  Lesson 5
  Where to download free business addresses;
  Geocoding (address mapping);
  
  Lesson 6
  Elements of good maps including colors, fonts and map must-haves Critique of several maps.