Digital Skills Workshops for PhD Students (UNIGE and Geneva Graduate Institute)

A map can be an excellent way to visualize your research. It can help you display your research sites, create a one-glance overview of how different areas score on some variable, or show the shortest straight-line distance between two phenomena. In this workshop, you will learn how to create maps that effectively communicate your research. We will be using a free and open-source software QGIS, and the workshop requires no prior (coding) experience. We will start by creating maps using existing QGIS files, then consider how to add your data of choice to these and display it effectively, and finally, we will do some basic geo-processing.

Having completed this workshop, you will be able to:

• Create a map of geographical features using existing QGIS shape files.
• Add data from a second source to geographical features, and display this on a map.
• Do basic geo-processing to add map elements such as buffers, straightest short-line distances etc. 
• Create your own map of geographical features from a picture or PDF. 
• Tailor all maps to communicate your data to your reader in a clear way.