Welcome to Mapping Colonial Australian Statistical Data#

In this workshop we will do a few things:

  1. Introduce you to colonial statistical datasets

  2. Introduce you to (re)constructing historical datasets

  3. Use Kepler.gl to map our datasets

At the end of this workshop we will be able to:

  1. Understand the value of interactive web maps as a form of geospatial analysis.

  2. Understand the advantages of open-source software for future-proofing our research.

  3. Be able to critically evaluate the difficulties and limitations working with historical data.

Why Kepler.gl?#

For your reference!

There are advantages and disadvantages to all kinds of mapping software. Kepler GL is not perfect but it is open-source (so you won’t lose your data behind a pay-wall) and it provides many data visualisation and anlysis functionalities that requires no coding experience.

What do we Need?#

  • A Dropbox account (to save and share our maps)

  • It is also worth signing up for a Mapbox account, you will require a token in future to continue to host or share your maps.

What we can’t do today!

Because Kepler is a client-side web application you cannot save or generate hyper-links to your maps directly from their website. We will be downloading the raw code of our maps so that we can share them with others (today we’ll do this through Dropbox) and so we can re-upload them to the Kepler site to make additional changes.