Workshops
The Geospatial Research Lab hosts workshops throughout the semester on topics in GIS, mapping, and data literacy. These sessions are open to students, faculty, and staff across American University. This page provides information about upcoming workshops and also serves as an archive where you can find handouts, slides, and other materials from past sessions.
Upcoming Workshops
TBD Spring 2026
This beginner-friendly workshop introduces the basics of working with R and RStudio. You’ll learn how to run code, navigate the RStudio interface, install and load packages, and work with simple data. No prior experience is required. We’ll start from the very beginning so you feel comfortable using R for future coursework, research, or data projects.
TBD Spring 2026
Learn how to create clean, publication-ready maps using R. This hands-on workshop introduces the basics of working with spatial data in R, including reading shapefiles/GeoJSON, joining data, styling layers, and exporting your map. No previous experience with R or GIS is required. We’ll start from the ground up with simple, clear examples you can adapt for research or class projects.
TBD Spring 2026
A strong portfolio can help you stand out in applications for internships, research positions, and graduate programs. This hands-on workshop will guide you through creating a GitHub Pages site to display your mapping and data visualization projects. You’ll leave with your own live website and a structure you can keep building on.
Past Workshops
October 2025 (Scary Data Week)
Digital data doesn’t always stay put. Websites change, tools disappear, and valuable datasets can quietly slip offline—sometimes forever. In this Scary Data Week workshop, you’ll learn how to bring data “back from the dead” using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. We’ll explore how and why datasets vanish, walk through the steps of preserving webpages, and give you the chance to reanimate a dataset of your own. No technical experience required—just curiosity, a laptop, and a willingness to protect public knowledge from the digital grave. Whether you’re a researcher, student, or data enthusiast, you’ll leave this session with practical skills and a deeper understanding of the role you can play in preserving civic information.
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October 2025
This session is part of the AI in Research series hosted by the Digital Research and Innovation Lab, focused on helping graduate students use emerging tools to explore, organize, and communicate research more effectively. This hands-on workshop introduces strategies for cleaning messy research data and shows how generative AI tools can support that process. You’ll learn how to identify common issues in tabular datasets including missing values, inconsistent formatting, and duplicates and how to plan a reproducible cleanup workflow. Then, we’ll explore how to use generative AI to help write R code for cleaning tasks, with an emphasis on producing reusable scripts and well-documented steps. Designed for graduate students working with real-world data, this session is useful for anyone preparing a dataset for analysis, visualization, or sharing. No prior experience with R is helpful, but not required.
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October 2025
This session is part of the AI in Research series hosted by the Digital Research and Innovation Lab, focused on helping graduate students use emerging tools to explore, organize, and communicate research more effectively. In this workshop, we’ll reframe the literature review not as a writing assignment, but as a discovery process grounded in digital scholarship. We’ll begin with the research you already know—articles from your coursework, advisor recommendations, and foundational texts in your field—and show how AI-supported tools like Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar, and Research Rabbit can help you follow citation networks, trace conceptual lineages, and identify related work across disciplines. Along the way, we’ll demonstrate how tools like Zotero and LibKey Nomad can streamline your research workflow and help you manage your growing body of sources. Whether you’re starting a thesis, preparing for comps, or just learning to navigate the scholarly conversation, this session offers practical, research-focused strategies for using AI to build an intentional, well-scoped literature review.
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August 2025
Part of the Center for Faculty Excellence’s August Faculty Workshops, this interactive workshop introduced mapping as a flexible teaching tool to help students across disciplines engage more deeply with course material. Participants took part in a sketch mapping activity that encouraged spatial reasoning and reflective thinking. The session explored how spatial thinking could help students understand relationships, power, movement, and place, and discussed simple tools from paper maps to Google Maps to web GIS for integrating mapping into teaching. It also highlighted how the library supported research and teaching with geospatial data, mapping tools, and spatial storytelling across disciplines.
April 2025
In collaboriation with the Digital Research and Innovation Lab, this fun and practical workshop helped participants bring order and clarity to messy spreadsheets using Marie Kondo-inspired principles in Excel. The session guided attendees through removing duplicates, tidying columns, and transforming cluttered datasets into meaningful insights. Whether participants were Excel novices or seasoned pros, they left with a fresh perspective on data organization and a toolkit of techniques for maintaining a sparkling, efficient workflow.
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