Author Archives: Lee Hachadoorian

CFP AAG 2022: Redistricting and Representation

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Following an extremely challenging decennial census, data for redistricting was released by the Census Bureau in August and September of 2021, about five months later than the usual April 1 release. By the time of the AAG meeting, many states will have concluded the redistricting process. This redistricting round will be held with increased public attention and increased availability of free tools for public analysis and input. Many states are redistricting under new systems implemented in reaction to the 2011 redistricting round, which resulted in what were widely seen as egregious partisan gerrymanders. Advocacy groups have emerged to fight for transparency and fair processes, and academics from diverse disciplines have focused or refocused their attention on redistricting and democracy.

While redistricting is happening now, as this call goes out, in reality the preparation for redistricting and battles over the process and the resulting plans are years-long affairs with the current redistricting round as the fulcrum. Despite anticipating that most states will have completed redistricting by the time of the AAG meeting, February 2022 will be the perfect time for discussion, analysis, and reflection.

We invite papers from diverse perspectives on any aspect of redistricting and redistricting reform, including community perspectives, methods, analysis, reports from the field, etc., Potential topics of interest include but are not limited to:

  • Traditional and emerging redistricting criteria
  • Prison gerrymandering, including reports from states which have implemented residence return of incarcerated persons
  • Automated redistricting and its relation to seminal methods in regionalization
  • Quantitative measures of partisan fairness, including innovations, use, impact, and validity
  • Comparison of redistricting bodies such as legislatures, bipartisan commissions, and nonpartisan commissions
  • The role of public participation in the redistricting process, including analysis of its impact on outcomes of the 2021 redistricting round
  • Communities of interest, including experiences of how legislatures and commissions incorporated information about COIs
  • The diminished Voting Rights Act and the impact of the redistricting process on minority representation
  • Public redistricting map submission, including map competitions and impact and evaluation of public maps
  • The geographer’s understanding of compactness and its use in redistricting
  • Open GIS (including open data) in the redistricting process

We expect that the conference will also host reflections on the Fall 2021 AAG Redistricting Panel Series and will coordinate with the organizers to ensure that these sessions form a cohesive track at AAG 2022.

Please send your Session ID, title, and 250 word abstract to Lee Hachadoorian (Lee.Hachadoorian@temple.edu) and James Thatcher (jethatch@uw.edu) by Tuesday, October 19. (If you need confirmation of inclusion before making a decision regarding conference registration, please contact us with your abstract by Sunday, October 17.) Indicate whether you intend to attend in person or virtually. We intend to organize at least one in person session, but with sufficient virtual papers may organize a virtual session as well.

Installing PostGIS

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These instructions are primarily intended to assist participants in the What’s the deal with PostGIS workshop organized by MaptimePHL. Of course, they may be useful to anyone who is new to PostGIS and considering installing it for any purpose.

PostGIS and PostgreSQL can be installed in many different ways, including installing from source for those who want bleeding edge features or who need to run it on unusual architectures. This workshop is geared toward people who are new to PostGIS but technically savvy, so I am suggesting a range of methods of varying complexity.

I recommend that everyone

OpenGeo Suite Installer

The simplest way to install PostGIS on Windows is to install OpenGeo Suite. This will also work for Mac or Linux, though I give additional choices below for these OSes. Installing this way will automatically initialize a cluster on localhost and configure pgAdmin to connect to it using trust authentication.

OpenGeo Suite is free, but you will have to register with Boundless to download it. When given the choice, make sure to select to install Client Tools, which will include pgAdmin for server management and the psql terminal client. You can uncheck

Boundless’ own Intro to PostGIS workshop provides more detailed installation instructions and step-by-step screenshots of the installer.

Boundless staff include core committers to PostGIS.

EnterpriseDB Installer

The EnterpriseDB installer is more oriented toward a general PostgreSQL install. Versions of the installer are available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. PostGIS will not install by default. After running the installer, you will be prompted to launch StackBuilder. In StackBuilder you will be able to select PostGIS (and other extensions) for installation.

You will not have to register to download EnterpriseDB. pgAdmin will be installed automatically.

EnterpriseDB is perhaps the leading commercial provider of PostgreSQL services, and employs many PostgreSQL community leaders.

Virtual Machines

If you would like to sandbox your PostGIS experiment, and/or if you are familiar with running virtual machines, I highly recommend that you consider trying out OSGeo-Live, a Linux distro chock full of geospatial software, including QGIS, which we also be making use of in this workshop. You will get an already configured PostGIS installation with some sample data built in.

The absolute fastest way to get up and running is to download the prebuilt VMDK and run it in VirtualBox or another virtualization software.

Mac Installation Options

The previous three options will all work for Mac. I don’t know anything about Mac, but I do know that Mac users like to think different(ly). I know people who have had good experience with Postgres.app. I know others who insist on doing everything through Homebrew. Here is a list of all the ways to install PostgreSQL on a Mac. Including the EnterpriseDB installer mentioned above.

Linux

By far the easiest installation option…if you already use Linux. (If not, try out OSGeo-Live.) For Ubuntu-based installations:

sudo apt-get install postgis postgresql-contrib pgadmin3

There, your done!

The Boundless and EnterpriseDB installers are also available for Linux, but I have a strong bias in favor of using the package manager.

Far more extensive instructions are available on my blog, which also discusses cluster management and restoring an old database after an upgrade.

Formatting and Sharing Your Syllabus with Markdown & GitHub

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  • Lee Hachadoorian (Markdown) and Ryan Burns (GitHub)
  • Friday, Oct 30, 3-4:30pm
  • Gladfelter 341

Preparation

The workshop will begin with a short demo, including some browser-based tools. However, if you want to get the most out of the hands-on part of the workshop, you should install pandoc (a Markdown converter) and GitHub Desktop beforehand, as well as creating a GitHub account.

Pandoc

Download the latest version from https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/releases

  • For Windows use the MSI intaller
  • For Mac use the PKG installer

Pandoc can convert to Word DOC(X), HTML, and a wide variety of formats. For PDF you also need to install LaTeX.

git/GitHub

Install git and create a GitHub account