HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

The project, a health program for children, families, and communities within Moshi by Harvard Medical School's Children's Health and Social Ecology (CHASE) program, seeks to improve children's health and slow the spread of AIDS by increasing community awareness of the threats the children face.

AIDS leaves many children orphaned and many more living in households where a single parent struggles to raise multiple children. The proliferation of AIDS orphans across Africa has stressed traditional social safety nets that would have provided care for the children within their extended families. Today, instead, many children must find their way on the streets.

Making the lot of those children safer is the goal of CHASE's principal investigators, Mary Carlson, associate professor of psychiatry, and Felton Earls, professor of social medicine at Harvard Medical School and professor of human behavior and development at the Harvard School of Public Health.

They're doing that by applying lessons learned in a long-running investigation of Chicago's neighborhoods, where they found that community engagement, not race or income, was the best predictor of patterns of social ills such as crime and violence.

Earls said that using the tools of geospatial analysis, researchers can collect data from specific locations, combine it in geographic information systems (GIS) software, analyze it, and map it in ways that can make important patterns easily apparent.

"It really is hypothesis generating," Earls said. "It helps you come up with and focus your hypothesis testing."

Applying Chicago's lessons to Moshi, the researchers are engaging primary school children in the community in health research. After tutoring by researchers, the children use modern geographic positioning and analysis technology to help locate areas of the city that are dangerous for children, such as "guest houses" where men often seek to engage young women in sex. Once the children map the threats, researchers are seeking to enable them to raise awareness within the community of these threats and, hopefully, spur action to keep children safe.

"We want to increase the vigilance and concern that adults have for children generally," Carlson said.

The project is one of many across Harvard, in which researchers are using the tools of geospatial analysis, including geographic information systems (GIS) software, to conduct research and analyze data according to space and time.

The technology's promise prompted Harvard Provost Steven E. Hyman to convene a faculty committee on geospatial analysis in 2004 to examine ways the University can support the technology and foster its use by faculty and students.

Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations Peter Bol, the committee chair, said the committee recommended several steps to increase use of the technology at Harvard. They include strengthening the Harvard Geospatial Library, which currently houses geospatial data and offers lessons on how to use GIS software. Other recommendations include multiplying the course offerings in GIS, increasing support for research, and adding faculty working on how spatial analysis and geographic information science can be integrated with other disciplines.

"What people are finding is that they don't know how to do things [with GIS]," Bol said.

A new Web site on GIS at Harvard, http://www.gis.harvard.edu, went live in February. The site offers GIS resources such as software, course descriptions, descriptions of various projects across the University that use GIS, as well as resources for those who want to learn to use GIS software.

New courses have been added at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Harvard School of Public Health, and new faculty appointments will also be made, with a new assistant professor being appointed at the Graduate School of Design.

"Geospatial analysis is an important tool that will enable us to present vast collections of new data and knowledge in both space and time, opening up new frames of reference and new avenues of analysis," said Hyman. "We're making a commitment to promote these tools and to foster research into geospatial analysis here at Harvard."

The Harvard Geospatial Library received a grant from the Library Digital Initiative to increase the amount of data available in the Geospatial Library and to increase outreach and training. The library, an arm of the Harvard Map Collection, provides training to students and faculty whose work will benefit from GIS.

"There's so much going on that could really benefit from GIS if [faculty, researchers, and students] only knew how to use it," said Bonnie Burns, the Map Collection's geographic information systems coordinator.

Burns said she's noticed an increasing demand for access to online training programs and an increasing number of people coming to the Map Collection for help learning GIS.

Bol said while historians think about information in terms of time and geographers think about it in terms of space, geospatial analysis technology such as GIS software allows researchers to do both. Public health information, for example, can be displayed in mapping software and then moved forward through time, to allow the researchers to see how the data changes at a glance.

"One can argue, and I think rightly, that it's a way of thinking about information," Bol said. "How phenomena are related to each other spatially."

Geospatial analysis is increasingly useful, Bol said, as researchers look to digest the avalanche of information collected by modern data systems and automated monitoring.

"In public health, for example, there is more and more statistical information about the population," Bol said. "There's hundreds and even thousands of variables to be examined to see if patterns emerge. GIS gives you an intuitive understanding of how things change over time."