MISC I: Reading Assignments

How to complete the Reading-Reporting Assignments

  • Reading-Reporting Assignments: one of your tasks will be to identify relevant readings (articles, book sections), read them, and provide short summaries (250-500 words) in the shared Zotero library for our course. You need to submit 5 such short summaries for full credit. “Relevant” means that these readings must be relevant to your own research interests. Ideally, you will use these readings as an additional background for your final projects. Some readings will be suggested, but I would encourage you to invest some time into this task and find your own readings (which is now very easy with such available resources as JSTOR).

Preparing and Submitting Your Reports

  • You will need Zotero for this task:
    • Download and install Zotero from https://www.zotero.org/;
    • Make sure to create an account and login into your accout both online and in Zotero;
      • Send me your user name so that I could add you to our group library in Zotero;
    • Make sure to install a browser connector into the browser of your choice (Chrome and Firefox are the best choices);
    • The browser connector will allow you to add publications automatically into Zotero from websites that you visit. This is very convenient to collect bibliography (and often automatically download PDFs, if they are available).
      • In order to download bibliographical data and PDFs into your Zotero from JSTOR (and some other similar kind of libraries), you need to know a couple of things:
        • you need to be logged in via your university account; otherwise you will not have access to PDFs;
        • you need to download the first PDF by manually clicking download button: it is ask you to agree to terms and conditions; after that you can use the browser connector button.
    • in Zotero:
      • collect publications on GIS that are relevant to your interests;
        • please, do spend some time looking for publications that are relevant to your interests. Do not grab the first things that you find. Use this as an opportunity to learn something new and interesting. The publications do not have to be from your field, whichever it is, but rather on a method or a case study that is likely to be applicable to your research area.
        • skim through what you have collected: check the structure; read intros and conclusions; skim through the rest;
      • based on this pre-reading, pick the most interesting 5 pieces; read them carefully and write your summaries, which must include the following:
        • briefly: what is the article about?
        • what GIS methods and technologies have been used in the study? Any specific software that should be mentioned?
        • what are the findings? specifically, what did GIS allow to discover versus other non-GIS methods?
        • what are the most interesting (i.e., most relevant to your interests) aspects of the study?
        • the volume should be 250-500 words
        • NB: you can write these summaries in any editor. When you are ready to submit them, you should do so by adding a Note to a specific publication and copy/paste your summary into that note.
      • Sharing your summaries:
        • in the rgis2021 group library in Zotero, create your own subcollection, which must be named Firstname Lastname - YOUMATRICNUMBER;
        • paste your records — with notes containing your summaries — into your folder;
        • let me know that you are done :)

Suggested Monographs

Check the References page for a list of suggested monographs; those also can be found in our group library rgis2021 available through Zotero.