Dalla Lana School of Public Health

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This workshop will provide an introduction to harmonizing data across spatial scales, with a particular emphasis on creating geographic crosswalks. Often, spatially-resolved data are available at non-uniform scales, and In different data types. For example, a researcher may wish to summarize hospital locations (point data), environmental exposures (raster data) and census demographics (census polygon data) at a neighbourhood level that may be at a non-census boundary (polygon data). This workshop will provide an overview of common data types such as raster and vector data, and provide details of vector data types (points, lines and polygons) for health applications. Next we will cover basic approaches to summarize multiple datasets for one research question to a common spatial scale. Then we will learn to create geographic crosswalks by aggregating census data to non-standard geographic units. This workshop will use R software and a provided dataset from CANUE and supplemental open datasets. Previous experience with R is required.