Methods in Human Geography

Welcome

Welcome to the second half of Methods in Human Geography. In this part of the module, you will delve into essential statistical analysis techniques and gain a basic foundation in creating thematic maps. We will be using R and the RStudio environment for statistical analysis, and the open-source programme QGIS for handling spatial data.

Moodle

Moodle is the central point of contact for GEOG0018 and it is where all important information will be communicated such as key module and assessment information. This workbook provides links to all reading materials and includes the content for all computer tutorials.

Module overview

The topics covered over the next five weeks are:

Week	Section	Topic
1	Getting Started	Getting Started
1	R for Data Analysis	R for Data Analysis
2	Statistical Analysis	Statistical Analysis I
3	Statistical Analysis	Statistical Analysis II
4	Spatial Analysis	Spatial Analysis I
5	Spatial Analysis	Spatial Analysis II

Major updates

This year’s version features the following major updates:

Full rewrite of the module material using Quarto.
Stronger emphasis on data cleaning and data preparation.
Using the tidyverse over base R where appropriate.
Replacing shapefile with GeoPackage.
Using QGIS to make thematic maps.

Acknowledgements

This workbook is created using the Quarto publishing system. Elements of this workbook and module material are partially based on and modified from:

The GEOG0014: Geocomputation 2023-2024 workbook by Justin van Dijk
Previous GEOG018: Methods in Human Geography content created by Rory Coulter
Previous POLS0008: Introduction to Quantitative Research Methods content created by Stephen Jivraj

The datasets used in this workbook contain:

Data from Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0