Purdue hosts GIS Cybertraining workshop sponsored by the National Science Foundation
A team of GIS and Social Science specialists from Purdue University hosted an NSF-funded workshop, “GIS Cybertraining for the Social Sciences,” on the Purdue West Lafayette campus June 29-30. Led by faculty and staff from Purdue University’s College of Liberal Arts, Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies, and the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing, the 1.5-day workshop (supported by NSF’s Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure through Award No. 2416650) brought together 23 social science educators, administrators, and students from California, Texas, Maryland, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Indiana to learn about recent approaches to incorporating geospatial tools into social science research and pedagogy. The workshop supported NSF’s CyberTraining program by building the computational, data and geospatial skills social science educators need to use advanced cyberinfrastructure in research and teaching.
This workshop is the second in a three-year series of annual training sessions. The first, held in August 2025, took the form of a virtual meeting between participants from higher education institutions across the country, totaling 13 participants. Discussion topics included the challenges of teaching GIS in social sciences and demonstrations of training modules.
The June 2026 workshop introduced participants to open-source, customizable teaching modules designed to help social science instructors incorporate geospatial methods into courses and lab settings. Hands-on training exercises showed participants how to access and customize off-the-shelf, open-source teaching modules the team are constructing with the aim of expanding access to geospatial methods for beginner to advanced users in social science disciplines. Participants also developed ideas for applying geospatial tools and data in their own classrooms. Instructors who continue to use the tools learned in this session will be supported by Purdue project members during the school year to adapt and develop customized modules for their own courses. The program also plans to establish a joint Faculty Certificate program in collaboration with participating instructors who complete the instructional module program.
The third and final workshop is planned to be held in summer 2027. Also, in-person, this session will allow the same instructors to supply feedback about their experiences customizing and deploying the training modules. The improvement made from this feedback will allow these tools to reach a bigger and broader audience.
The workshop team included Ian Lindsay and Zoe Nyssa of Anthropology; Nicole Kong and Innocensia Owuor of Purdue Libraries and the School of Information Studies; Lan Zhao of the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing, as well as graduate students Max Gosch and Aniket Dev Roy.