Geography and Geographic Information Science (GIS)

Powerful proprietary desktop software for GIS.

As a member of the OU community, get an evaluation one-year license to use ArcGIS software.

Free and open source programming environment. Requires installation of additional packages to enable most GIS applications.

Information and downloads for the Python programming language.

Open source Python 3.7 platform for data science.

A free and open-source GIS software including both a graphical user interface and options for accessing command line resources.

Step-by-step instructions and documentation for ArcGIS software including ArcMap.

Tutorials for ArcGIS produced by the software company.

ESRI free video tutorial on scripting with Python for ArcGIS.

Links compiled by QGIS maintainers for QGIS training materials and tutorials in multiple languages.

Step-by-step tutorials on using R for raster data analyses hosted by the National Ecological Observatory Network.

Step-by-step tutorials on using R for vector data analyses hosted by the National Ecological Observatory Network.

Workshops hosted by OU Libraries every semester that feature introductory scripting, tidy data, version control, and either Python or R.

This page features projects on which OU Libraries has assisted with GIS work and contains a link to the Digital Scholarship Lab for consultations.

Contact a Digital Scholarship specialist for GIS assistance.

A searchable question and answer website for GIS users. If you can't find your answer, you can create a reproducible example and ask your own question.

An Oklahoma-based guide listing many of the resources below and more.

"Database covers all countries and contains over eleven million placenames that are available for download free of charge."

Geographic search, indexing scientific research studies. Some have GIS data, some do not.

Open Data Portal hosted by the publisher of ArcGIS.

"Native Land Digital is a Canadian not-for-profit organization, incorporated in December 2018. Native Land Digital is Indigenous-led, with an Indigenous Executive Director and Board of Directors who oversee and direct the organization. [...] Maps potentially function as colonial artifacts and represent a very particular way of seeing the world – a way primarily concerned with ownership, exclusivity, and power relations."

"Census and survey data from around the world integrated across time and space."

NASA

"Gapminder produces free teaching resources making the world understandable based on reliable statistics."

"The information system PANGAEA is operated as an Open Access library aimed at archiving, publishing and distributing georeferenced data from earth system research. The system guarantees long-term availability of its content through a commitment of the hosting institutions."

"Our Mission: To increase awareness and understanding of living nature through an Encyclopedia of Life that gathers, generates, and shares knowledge in an open, freely accessible and trusted digital resource."

Sponsored by the USDA and Natural Resources Conservation Service

"This information has been meticulously sourced from the three largest, most comprehensive and impartial crowdsourced databases on police killings in the country: FatalEncounters.org, the U.S. Police Shootings Database and KilledbyPolice.net. We've also done extensive original research to further improve the quality and completeness of the data; searching social media, obituaries, criminal records databases, police reports and other sources to identify the race of 90 percent of all victims in the database." Provides map and infographics as well as raw data download as spreadsheet.

Search within the research areas on the site for GIS data specific to your needs.

National Historic Geographic Information System
Hosted by University of Minnesota

Links to National Map, National Atlas and Geospatial One Stop

Each office has their own data centers.

Exploratory Desktop provides an advanced, interactive, and reproducible data wrangling and analysis experience powered by R and visualization.

"This how-to guide covers the mechanics of data collection for applied qualitative research. It is appropriate for novice and experienced researchers alike. It can be used as both a training tool and a daily reference manual for field team members. The question and answer format and modular design make it easy for readers to find information on a particular topic quickly."

This open and free introductory statistics textbook covers topics typical for a college-level non-math majors statistics course. Topics include distributions, probability, research design, estimation, hypothesis testing, power and effect size, comparison of means, regression, analysis of variance (ANOVA), transformations, chi square, and non-parametric (distribution-free) tests). It is available as a pdf, online, or as an epub. An Instructor's Manual and PowerPoint slides are also available upon request from the project leader at Rice University.

A free and open introductory statistics textbook for non-math majors. "They have sought to present only the core concepts and use a wide-ranging set of exercises for each concept to drive comprehension. [...] a smaller and less intimidating textbook that trades some extended and unnecessary topics for a better-focused presentation of the central material." It covers descriptive statistics, probability, distributions, discrete and continuous random variables, estimation, hypothesis testing, comparison of means, correlation and regression, chi square, and F-tests.

"We hope readers will take away three ideas from this book in addition to forming a foundation of statistical thinking and methods. (1) Statistics is an applied field with a wide range of practical applications. (2) You don't have to be a math guru to learn from interesting, real data. (3) Data are messy, and statistical tools are imperfect. However, when you understand the strengths and weaknesses of these tools, you can use them to learn interesting things about the world." This free and open introductory statistics textbook for non-math majors discusses data and data collection, foundations for inference with randomization and simulations (then leading into standard parametric statistics), inference with categorical and numerical data, and linear, multiple logistic regression. An introduction to probability is included as an appendix.

Curates multiple openly available statistics textbooks.

"Reference tool covering statistics, probability theory, biostatistics, quality control, and economics with emphasis in applications of statistical methods in sociology, engineering, computer science, biomedicine, psychology, survey methodology, and other client disciplines." A good source for topics less often covered in the general textbooks.

"More than 500 entries include definitions, history, mathematical details, limitations, examples, references, and further readings. All entries include cross-references as well as the key citations. The back matter includes a timeline of statistical inventions." Another good resource for topics not included in the general texts listed previously.

NIEHS supported public data sets.

Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) is a freely available dictionary of molecular entities focused on ‘small’ chemical compounds. (European Bioinformatics Institute)

CTD illuminates how environmental chemicals affect human health.

Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE) is the foundation of new innovative environmental science through a distributed framework and sustainable cyberinfrastructure that meets the needs of science and society for open, persistent, robust, and secure access to well-described and easily discovered Earth observational data.

The NIEHS Environmental Genome Project is a multi-disciplinary, collaborative effort focused on examining the relationships between environmental exposures, inter-individual sequence variation in human genes and disease risk in U.S. populations.

International Association for Social Science Information Services & Technology data sources.

Links to 12 science related data sets supported by NIEHS.

Directory of Open Access Repositories.