From left: Brian Clifton, Sam Lavigne, and Francis Tseng. "White Collar Crime Risk Zones." The New Inquiry, 2017.; Dennis Wood. 2011. "Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas" via Places Journal; Laura Kurgan, Dan Miller, and Adam Vosburgh. "Two Sides of the Same Coin." Milan Triennale, 2025.

Syllabus

Spring 2026 Friday 9-11 3 credits 300 Buell South

Adam Vosburgh adam (dot) vosburgh (at) columbia.edu office hours by appointment, sign up at the link on the top of the page.

Description

This course provides an introduction to the critical use of geographic information systems (GIS) and the use of spatial methods for urban humanities research.

Maps and geographic analysis are key tools for interpreting the built environment and the social conditions it contains. GIS methods allow for the analysis of geographic features together with attributes (environmental, social, demographic, political) of those places. The thoughtful use of spatial data can reveal previously unseen patterns, changing the way we see and engage with our world. However, maps are never just representations, they are nearly always active agents in shaping the worlds they describe. With this in mind, students will be introduced to a range of approaches for creating and manipulating spatial data with a focus on the forms of authorship, design, subjectivity embedded in spatial data and its uses.

This course is divided into two halves:

• In the first, participants will develop basic fluency with open-source mapping software, QGIS, methods of data collection and creation, and approaches and concepts in critical spatial analysis and map design through hands on exercises and weekly assignments.
• In the second, particpants will form groups and develop their own proposals with data and methodologies of their own selection. This work will culminate in a series of two "Show and Tells" at the end of the class, and a final public-facing website.

Course Overview

Weekly Schedule, Readings, & Assignments

All course tutorials and assignments will be posted here on the course website.

All readings and previous lecture slides will be posted in the course dropbox (linked at the top of the page).

Assignments should be submitted on the course Canvas and the course Miro (linked at the top of the page.)

1/23 | Week 1 | Introduction to Critical GIS + Spatial Data Types

In class

Group map critiques. Examples to be distributed during class

1/30 | Week 2 | Cartographic Projections

Assignment 0 due – NYC Trees

Readings (available in course dropbox)

Corner, James. "The Agency of Mapping." 2014.

Couclelis, Helen. "People Manipulate Objects (but Cultivate Fields): Beyond the Raster-Vector Debate in GIS." 1992.

Cooper, Danika. "Drawing Deserts, Making Worlds." Essay. In Deserts Are Not Empty, edited by Samia Henni, 79–107. Columbia University, 2022.

Review projects/precedent examples page. Pick out two-three examples each week to review thoroughly on your own.

Optional: Rankin, William. "Introduction Territory and the Mapping Sciences" in After The Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2016. [available online via CLIO here]

2/06 | Week 3 | Georeferencing and Digitizing Archives

Assignment 1 due – Intentional Misuse

Readings (available in course dropbox)

Baics, Gergely, and Leah Meisterlin. "Zoning Before Zoning: Land Use and Density in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York City." 2016.

Parshina-Kottas, Yuliya, Anjali Singhvi, Audra D.S. Burch, Troy Griggs, Mika Gröndahl, Lingdong Huang, Tim Wallace, Jeremy White, and Josh Williams. "What the Tulsa Race Massacre Destroyed." New York Times, May 24, 2021. For further research, Tulsa data files are located here.

2/13 | Week 4 | Using and Collecting Data

Assignment 2 due – Selective Digitization

Readings (available in course dropbox)

Folder. Italian Limes. 2014

Ferrari, Marco, Elisa Pasqual, Alessandro Busi, Aaron Gillett. A Moving Border: Alpine Cartographies of Climate Change [Selections]. 2019

Wood, Denis. "Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas." In Places Journal. 2011.

2/20 | Week 5 | Remote Sensing

Assignment 3 due – Mapping Observations

Readings (available in course dropbox)

Kurgan, Laura. "Mapping Considered as a Problem of Theory and Practice." 2013.

Please also review from week 2: Couclelis, Helen. "People Manipulate Objects (but Cultivate Fields): Beyond the Raster-Vector Debate in GIS." 1992

2/27 | Week 6 | Narrative & Design

Assignment 4 due – Mapping Remotely

Readings

Please watch: In Plain Sight. by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Laura Kurgan, Robert Gerard Pietrusko with Columbia Center for Spatial Research at the 2018 U.S. Pavilion.

3/06 | Week 7 | Proposal Workshop

Proposal Due

Sign-up for a workshop time on the day of class to go over your proposal.

3/13 | Week 8 | Kinne Week - No Class?

Depending on the amount of people traveling, we may not hold class this week.

3/20 | Week 9 | Spring Break - No Class

3/27 | Week 10 | "Spatial Intelligence"

Assignment 5 due

Readings

House, Brian. "Stalking the Smart City." 2019

4/03 | Week 11 | Simulations + Living in the Map

Assignment 6 due (for extra credit)

Readings

4/10 | Week 12 | Show and Tell Day 1

Group 1 Presentations

4/17 | Week 13 | Show and Tell Day 2

Group 2 Presentations

5/06 | Website Due

Class Requirements and Grading

Grading for the class is as follows:

There are a total of 21 possible points. Attendance for each session, assignments and in class contribution each count for one point. The final project is worth four points. 19 points and above is a HP, 15 points and above is a P, 12 points and above is a LP, and anything below that is a F.

Attendance (11 points) Attendance at all class sessions is required. Per GSAPP attendance policy, three unexcused absences is an automatic Unofficial Withdrawal (UW).

In-class participation (1 point) You are expected to give engaged and generous participation in class discussions and in critique workshops with your peers.

Assignments (5 points, 1 point each) Weekly map assignments will allow you to apply the skills acquired via tutorials and begin to experiment with creative applications of spatial methods. Assignments are graded on completion and are intended to be limited in scope; experimental; and geared towards learning and creative engagement rather than demonstrating advanced skills. Assignment descriptions and associated assessment rubrics can be found on the assignments tab of the course site.

Final Project + Presentation (4 points) The final project is worth four total points. Two points will be awarded based on the show and tell presentation, and two points will be awarded for the final submission on the course website.

Extra Credit (1 point each) Extra credit will be given for the completion of assignment 5, and additional extra credit can be assigned by the instructor in the even that a student has a LP or F.

Learning Objectives

After completing the course participants will:

• Develop robust familiarity with QGIS and its functions
• Gain fluency with foundational GIS concepts (including how the GIS data model abstracts geographic phenomena)
• Understand GIS spatial data types and the kinds of analysis that are possible with each
• Create new spatial datasets from field observation and participatory sensing
• Create new spatial datasets from archival sources
• Access and use multispectral satellite imagery
• Acquire fluency with visual design concepts central to cartographic representations

AI Policy

Students are welcome to use AI tools in the class, except for the purpose of:

• Developing maps or images for the purpose of turning them in as a student's own work.
• Producing original writing that the student turns in as their own work.
• Prompting a LLM to produce data for them. This will ALWAYS result in fabricated data.
• Asking a LLM to analyze data for you. This is only permissible if complimented with a robust human analysis.

Uses of AI in these ways is counter to the critical objectives in this class. Work that uses AI in these ways, and in other ways that the instructor determines are counter to the objectives of the class, will not be awarded points.

Software

Geographic Information Systems is not a software. As such this course will not seek to provide students with proficiency in a particular software platform. Tutorial resources will be primarily provided for QGIS LTR. This is an open source software program for geographic analysis that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. All students will be expected to download and install QGIS LTR. Documentation for QGIS is available here, and a training manual with good basic tutorials is available here and an introduction to GIS methods using QGIS is available here. Information regarding other GIS softwares will be provided in course resources. Knowledge of design and layout programs (Adobe Illustrator, and InDesign) may be useful to you but is not required.

Academic Integrity

The intellectual venture in which we are all engaged requires of faculty and students alike the highest level of personal and academic integrity. As members of an academic community, each one of us bears the responsibility to participate in scholarly discourse and research in a manner characterized by intellectual honesty and scholarly integrity.

Scholarship, by its very nature, is an iterative process, with ideas and insights building one upon the other. Collaborative scholarship requires the study of other scholars' work, the free discussion of such work, and the explicit acknowledgement of those ideas in any work that inform our own. This exchange of ideas relies upon a mutual trust that sources, opinions, facts, and insights will be properly noted and carefully credited.

In practical terms, this means that, as students, you must be responsible for the full citations of others' ideas in all of your research papers and projects; you must be scrupulously honest when taking your examinations; you must always submit your own work and not that of another student, scholar, or internet agent.

Any breach of this intellectual responsibility is a breach of faith with the rest of our academic community. It undermines our shared intellectual culture, and it cannot be tolerated. Students failing to meet these responsibilities should anticipate being asked to leave Columbia.

For more information on academic integrity at Columbia, students may refer to the Columbia University Undergraduate Guide to Academic Integrity as well as the GSAPP Honor System and Plagiarism Policy.

Community & Accessibility

This is a discussion and collaborative-critique based course. All students and the instructor must be respectful of others in the classroom. If you ever feel that the classroom environment is discouraging your participation or is problematic in anyway please contact me.

GSAPP is committed to full inclusion of all students. Students needing any form of accommodation due to a disability should check in with Disability Services (DS) and speak with me at the beginning of the semester to provide the accommodations letter from DS. Alternatively you may ask your advisor to consult with me regarding your accommodations.

Email Policy

Students should not rely on or expect an immediate response to questions sent via email to the instructor. Please begin assignments with enough time to attend office hours or ask a question several days before the assignment is due.

Learning how to troubleshoot technical issues and locate relevant resources is crucial in your long-term success with GIS methods. With this in mind emails with technical questions must at a minimum contain the following:

• a clear description of what you are trying to do, and what the problem is
• a summary of the steps you have already taken to address the issue
• screenshots (where applicable) that help to explain the problem
• a link to at least one website you consulted for assistance with the issue before writing the email.The QGIS docs is a good starting place as is GIS Stack Exchange.

Bibliography

Baics, Gergely, and Leah Meisterlin. "Zoning Before Zoning: Land Use and Density in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York City." Annals of the American Association of Geographers 106, no. 5 (September 2, 2016): 1152–75.

Battle-Baptiste, Whitney, and Britt Rusert, eds. W.E.B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America: The Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. First edition. [Amherst, Massachusetts] : Hudson, NY: The W.E.B. Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst ; Princeton Architectural Press, 2018.

Corner, James. "The Agency of Mapping." In Landscape Imagination: Collected Essays of James Corner 1990-2010. New York, UNITED STATES: Princeton Architectural Press, 2014.

Cooper, Danika. "Drawing Deserts, Making Worlds." Essay. In Deserts Are Not Empty, edited by Samia Henni, 79–107. Columbia University, 2022.

Couclelis, Helen. "People Manipulate Objects (but Cultivate Fields): Beyond the Raster-Vector Debate in GIS." In Theories and Methods of Spatio-Temporal Reasoning in Geographic Space, edited by A. U. Frank, I. Campari, and U. Formentini, 639:65–77. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 1992.

Desimini, Jill, and Charles Waldheim. "Introduction: Projecting the Landscape Imaginary." In Cartographic Grounds : Projecting the Landscape Imaginary. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2016.

Ferrari, Marco, Elisa Pasqual, and Andrea Bagnato. A Moving Border: Alpine Cartographies of Climate Change. New York, NY: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2019.

House, Brian. "Stalking the Smart City." Urban Omnibus 2019

Kurgan, Laura. "Mapping Considered as a Problem of Theory and Practice." In Close up at a Distance : Mapping, Technology, and Politics, 9–18. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2013.

Mörtenböck, Peter, and Helge Mooshammer, eds. Informal Market Worlds: The Architecture of Economic Pressure. Rotterdam: NAI010 Publishers, 2015.

Rankin, William. "Introduction Territory and the Mapping Sciences" in After The Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2016.

Williams, Sarah, Jacqueline Klopp, Daniel Orwa, Peter Waiganjo, and Adam White. "Digital Matatus: Using Mobile Technology to Visualize Informality." ACSA Annual Meeting Proceedings, The Expanding Periphery and the Migrating Center, 2015, 9.

Wood, Dennis. "Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas." In Places Journal. 2011.

Woods, Clyde Adrian., and Katherine. McKittrick. "No One Knows the Mysteries at the Bottom of the Ocean." In Black Geographies and the Politics of Place. Toronto, Ont. : Cambridge, Mass.: Between the Lines ; South End Press, 2007.

Parshina-Kottas, Yuliya, Anjali Singhvi, Audra D.S. Burch, Troy Griggs, Mika Gröndahl, Lingdong Huang, Tim Wallace, Jeremy White, and Josh Williams. "What the Tulsa Race Massacre Destroyed." New York Times, May 24, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/05/24/us/tulsa-race-massacre.html.

Brian Clifton, Sam Lavigne, and Francis Tseng. "White Collar Crime Risk Zones." The New Inquiry, 2017. https://whitecollar.thenewinquiry.com/.

Laura Kurgan, Dan Miller, and Adam Vosburgh. "Two Sides of the Same Coin." Milan Triennale, 2015. https://c4sr.columbia.edu/projects/two-sides-same-coin.