Research

At S4 our principal focus is to develop, support, and extend spatial research at Brown. To that end we both initiate and consult on a wide variety of research projects and proposals. Selected projects, representing the breadth of our work, are highlighted on the projects section. We provide consulting services free of charge to the Brown community. We hope that by providing this service the Brown research community will be more successful in their grantsmanship, more effective in achieving their research goals, and have a broader impact on the scholarly community.

Consulting

Project Development: The S4 Director and Associate Director are available to meet with members of the Brown community to assist with project development. At any stage in project development S4 can help identify needs, assist with research design, and consult on execution/operational concerns.

Technical Consulting: The S4 Associate Director (Franklin) and the GIS/Computing Manager (Li) can provide tecnical consulting in the following areas:

• Interactive web based mapping (Li)
• Website development, data storage, and dissemination (Li)
• ArcGIS custom application development (Li)
• Advanced features of ArcGIS (Li, Franklin)
• Scripting for ArcGIS in Python/VBA (Li, Franklin)
• Applied spatial statistics, geocomputation, and simulation (Franklin)
• Spatial analysis in R (Franklin)
• Spatial database design (Li, Franklin)
• Cartography and spatial data visualization (Franklin)

Training

At S4 we believe that an important way to achieve our research mission is through training. Our core faculty teach courses on spatial thinking and methods- including courses on spatial thinking, cartography & GIS, spatial analysis and modeling, and spatial statistics.

Our signature training activity is the annual GIS Institute. The GIS institute provides an opportunity for faculty and doctoral students to learn spatial methods by doing spatial research. The GIS institute is a two week intensive training through which participants develop spatial research questions and learn spatial analysis and cartographic tools.

Additional training is available through Library short courses on GIS software.

Intellectual Community

We support spatial inquiry by fostering a community of spatial researchers at Brown.  S4’s core faculty are from the disciplines of economics, history, geography, sociology, and statistics and our over 40 faculty affiliates represent the breadth of spatial thinking in of the humanities, social science, and physical sciences at Brown.

Colloquium: S4 sponsors a colloquium series that features speakers from a across the social sciences. Our colloquiua aim to foster discussion and stimulate ideas around spatial topics in the social sciences. For list of recent speakers and their abstracts see the colloquium page.