In my last article, I talked about cleaning the data for geocoding. Let me talk about geocoders for a moment. There are many options out there. And some you might have heard of. Sure, Google has a very easy to use, well built geocoding service. And if you are processing…

Geocoding is a basic element of mapping. This is taking a list of addresses and giving them an XY coordinate for location. This XY coordinate allows you to add symbology classes to reporting like these examples: There are a few steps to get there. The first is to clean the…

I am a business analyst with a GIS past. As an analyst, I am asked to present data in informative ways to executives. This is the beginning of a series of articles in which I will demonstrate how GIS can be used in reporting for the masses. Whether you are…

A technical dive into narrowing a large dataset. — Recently I completed a project to predict at-risk communities for food insecurity in America. You can find information about that project here that includes code and a PowerPoint presentation. For that project, I used government datasets from the USDA called SNAP QC data. These are massive datasets of over 40k…

There are many at-risk groups during COVID, and food insecurity is a major concern when assistance programs started to get defunded during a crisis. Many news outlets are starting to report on this, like NPR and the NY Times. For this reason, I wanted to do a risk assessment on…

Culture is a way we define our environment. It can be conceived as a set of rules used to help keep us all working nicely with each other. Since our environments are different, our culture is different. But what does it mean to be human? …

Let’s keep an open mind and think of culture conceptually as an arbitrary thing. Culture is a set of “agreed upon” rules. Meaning “groups” set them and we all adhere to them. Now think of that as an arbitrary process somewhat. …

In the GIS world, Specialist is usually a versatile word meant for somebody with analyst, developer, and geodatabase skills. In this definition, “versus” is a false dichotomy. Honestly, most GIS skills are data scientist skills. Data Scientists are GIS Specialists, only GIS professionals have the specialty of thinking spatially. As…

As a former archaeologist who ended up as a GIS Supervisor at an electric company, I have a few examples of models to build from that seem vastly different, but when applied to the bias/variance trade-off actually have a lot of modeling similarities. What does bias look like in archaeology…