Space and physical resources

S4 is housed in a suite of newly renovated offices on the third floor of Maxcy Hall, an area previously occupied by PSTC and a short walk from the Cabinet Building . S4 space includes a conference room, staff offices, and workspace for faculty and graduate research assistants whose projects draw heavily on spatial computing infrastructure. S4 maintains two dual-processor servers in the basement of Maxcy Hall, maintained by the Sociology Department's computer professional, as well as a shared testing server available to the staff for program development. All staff have high-powered PCs with the necessary power required to process large spatial data files.

S4 also has access to a user lab with support for spatial analysis in the Cabinet Building , with eight workstations and a large plotter/printer. Another user lab with a similar plotter/printer is shared by S4 and the Department of Sociology in Maxcy Hall. A university site license makes all ESRI software available at every workstation. For specialized applications (including digitizing and high-resolution photography of printed maps), facilities are available in the University Library and the Department of Geological Sciences' Earthlab.

Current and projected services

Consulting and support of spatial projects. A large number of research projects, including student-initiated studies, draw on the S4 staff for consultation and support. The staff assists in locating appropriate boundary files and spatially referenced datasets, creating maps for presentations or publications, and applying spatial analysis software tools. Much consultation is done on a sustained basis for continuing projects, where a doctoral-level staff member often becomes a collaborator who participates in project development, data analysis, and publication. There is also a growing demand for occasional consulting by faculty or graduate assistants who can work independently on most aspects of a study, but need assistance with a specific technique.

Training in spatial analysis. S4 coordinates an introductory graduate course on spatial methods in social science on an annual basis, taught in Fall 2005 by Zhang, as well as a more conceptually oriented course on spatial thinking, taught in Spring 2005 by Logan . These courses draw 10-20 graduate students, and are distinguished by their appeal to students in multiple disciplines, especially Sociology, Economics, Anthropology, Environmental Studies, and Community Health. Bell , as S4 Associate Director, will develop a series of 1-2 day workshops for faculty and graduate students on special topics, such as remote sensing, geocoding, and creation of boundary files, multilevel spatial models and Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis. These efforts will find immediate use by projects at Brown. A two-week workshop in Summer 2006 will offer a more complete introduction to spatial analysis for new users.

Colloquium series on spatial topics. An important outreach activity of S4 is the organization of a series of talks by both internal and visiting speakers that illustrate the range of topics and approaches in spatial social science. Some recent talks by Brown faculty have focused on methodological issues, while others have been on substantive research issues. The range of application area is broad, from factor analysis for spatially correlated data, to new measures of residential segregation, to the relationship between residential patterns and air quality, to secondary migration among Mexican immigrants. In March 2006 S4 collaborated with faculty in Brown's Environmental Change Initiative to hold a national conference on impacts and recovery from disasters in ecosystems and human communities. In April 2006 it is supporting a conference organized by graduate students that will be built around student papers on “Space as a Category of Analysis: New Perspectives.”  

Research and data dissemination. S4 provides support for making research results and data available to a wider public. The most current versions of Census 2000 webpages developed by Logan , stemming from his prior work at the University at Albany , are now supported at Brown University . New web pages provide data on school segregation and desegregation lawsuits, and a web-based GIS system allows users to visualize and download school data for all districts in New York State . A newly developed software template makes it possible to project data for the entire nation from Census 2000 (the MapUSA system at http://maps.s4.brown.edu/mapusa ). S4 is now engaged in several projects at Brown that draw on this programming and design expertise. One project is matching data on air quality and exposure to air toxins from a national study of environmental health. As more scholars invest in such spatial data sets, it becomes increasingly important to offer mechanisms to allow others to probe their contents and download them in usable formats.