Library Data Award Winners
The University of Chicago Library is pleased to announce the Library Data Award Winners for Spring 2022: Fern Ramoutar, a PhD student at the Booth School, and Varun Kapoor, a PhD student in Economics. Ramoutar and Kapoor submitted a joint application for the purchase of mobile coverage map data for 2010-2020 from Collins Bartholomew, a leading supplier of global digital map data.
The data includes aggregated 2G (GSM) and 3G and 4G (LTE) coverage from telecommunications operators around the world. Polygons representing network coverage are split into country areas. Picture here is an example of LTE data coverage for a carrier in the United States. The maps will be provided in shapefile format which store spatial information as points, lines, and polygons. Shapefiles are used in geographic information software like QGIS, GeoDa, and ArcGIS. QGIS and GeoDa are free and open software that are available for download. ArcGIS software is available in the Library’s GIS Hub and Map Collection.
The dataset is available through the Library Catalog to current students, faculty, and staff.
Ramoutar and Kapoor plan to combine the spatial cellular network data with data on violence from the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone, or GDELT, database to see whether places with increased access to internet witnessed a concomitant increase in violence. Describing their research, Ramoutar and Kapoor note that anecdotal evidence suggests that the spread of high-speed internet has been accompanied by a rise in violence related to misinformation. Additionally, the internet has allowed for violence to be organized through coordination of violent forces who were otherwise separated by space. They plan for the research to be published as a dissertation chapter and in a peer reviewed paper.
Have questions on finding data for your project? Subject and data specialists are available to students, faculty, and staff for research consultations. Librarians can also help faculty integrate data into their classroom instruction, for example creating assignments with data from the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). Please reach out to the Ask a Librarian service to be connected with a specialist.
