Week 1: Mapping Introduction

Welcome to FYS 

Zombies, Black Bears, and the Meadowlands:

Mapping Fears and Social Environments

I am Professor LePore. Your Peer Facilitators are Anuj and Christina. You can email any of us with questions at any time.  


This course combines cartography, water testing/ citizen science, and basic policy/civil society engagement. Through this course you will learn about your fellow students, the landscape of Ramapo and the surrounding area in the context of NJ and the NY Metro area, and you will learn how to navigate the structure  of the college. Through this course you will understanding how being able to visualize data tied to a fear, a physical landscape or even a social landscape can give you new ways to interpret that data. THERE ARE 3 MANDATORY TRIPS

Students will be spending some time in the waterways of the Meadowlands and making comparisons between campus, the NYC high line, and a 1.5 mile stretch of their home town. We will also be visiting Newark to learn first hand how the Ironbound Community Corporation has used regular people, data, and mapping to create policies that better benefit people living in the Ironbound.

Special Dates - Where your attendance is required:

Welcome Week BBQ• When: Tuesday, September 3rd; 11:15 am-1:00 pm• Where: Alumni Lounges 156-158• Followed by Convocation

Whitney Museum (mandatory)• When: Saturday, September 14th; 8:45 am-5:30 pm• Board buses at Bradley Center 8:45 am. Breakfast provided. Buy lunch in NYC. Board buses at Whitney at 4:15 pm to return. Leaving Whitney by 4:30 pm. We should be back at RCNJ by around 5:30• Where: Whitney Museum, free time to walk High Line, explore Chelsea Markets 
Meadowlands Waterways (Mandatory)• When: Weds October 2nd• Board buses at Bradley Center 8:45 am. We should be back at RCNJ by around 1:15

RCNJ Sporting Event: • When: MSOC vs. TCNJ September 28th at 1pm• Where: Soccer Field

She Kills Monsters (Dress Rehearsal):  Limited to first 50 who register! • When: Thursday,  October 17th; 8:00pm• Where: Adler Theater• Registration required.• If there are less than 50 registered on October 15th, the seats will be released for peers & RAs.

Stargazing with Ron Russo• When: early November, TBA• Where: meet in Bradley Center Spectator Lobby• Hot cocoa will be provided while Professor Russo, one of the most popular professors on campus, provides an introduction to stargazing and our relationship to the cosmos.

Ironbound CC Environmental Justice Tour  (Mandatory)• When: Early November TBA• Board buses at Bradley Center 8:45 am. We should be back at RCNJ by around 1:15

Wellness: End of the Semester Study Break• When: December during exam week, TBA• Where: Mackin Hall or Pavilion, TBA• Note:  Mackin Hall RAs will facilitate this December event again.  FLC peers can team up with you.

Other potential peer/RA-led events:• How to Survive your First Semester peer panel (September)• Shuttle trip or Hike (October)

***Add to your syllabus:
Late policy for homework:
-A person's first late assignment can be handed in up to 3 days late with no penalty.
-Additional late assignments will receive a grade reduction of 1 letter grade a day for up to 3 days, after which, the assignment will receive no credit.

Policy for phone use:
Glance at your phone as needed. If a response is required, please step outside to text or talk.

Why Mapping?

Mapping technology has recently been the focus of much critical attention as evidenced by numerous efforts to develop new ways of visualizing not only spaces, but complex sets of data. The proliferation of tools such as Neatline, The DM Project, Google Earth, and Story Maps has made mapping the stuff of both academic endeavors and everyday life.

Using the process of data mapping, students will be encouraged to make connections between math and image creation, science and narrative, research and analysis.  The focus of environmental data mapping will help students to understand their immediate surroundings better. The context of environmental issues is a relevant one that easily supports the visual display of both research and analysis. 

Student group research projects are based on multiple site visits. We will conduct over an hour of location-specific sampling at multiple sites in Northeastern New Jersey. Our data collection combined with orienteering, and landscape image documentation will create data points in context for comparative analysis, personal storytelling, and creative expression.

from Partnerships for Environmental Public Health (PEPH)

Your first mapping experiment 

This week you will have attempted both your first map and your first narrative.  Creating maps means making choices about the scope and scale of what's being documented. Which things will be labeled and how? How does the scope of your map differ from the scope of your narrative?

Mapping Literature

from Visual Complexity, Manuel Lima

from Visual Complexity, Manuel Lima

Stefanie Posavec

Writing Without Words 2008

A chart of the structure of part one pf Jack Kerouac’s On The Road (1957). Each splitting of the branch into progressively smaller sections paralells the organization of the content from charts to paragraphs sentences and words. Each color relates to one of eleven thematic categories created by Posavec for the book (e.g., travel, work, and survival, sketches of regional life). 

On Tuesday we talked about:
Optimism
Fate/Luck
Risk/Action
What we deserve (a judgement according to...)
There are positives and negatives to the themes of Sarann (the Cambodian Cinderella) or any Cinderella story:

In Class:
Create your campus map. Include the most important places, make it to scale, include symbols and titles as appropriate.
Come back to the classroom for a map comparison.

For Homework (A):
-Write about yourself here:
The Rent collector has to do with luck and fate, but it also has to do with taking risks or taking action. Maybe you mark your own life history by changes that have happened to you (luck) or changes you've made happen yourself (action or risk-taking). Perhaps you've had different ideas of yourself in these different circumstances.  How did you get to be here at Ramapo? Luck? Action? or both? Write in as much detail as possible how you describe your current circumstance in comparison to a previous one. 

I'm looking for about two pages of content. Don't write just to fill up the space, try to describe situations that made things more enjoyable and also ones that were more difficult. These, combined with your ideas about how you came to be here at college will be important in describing the forces that shape you. Please draw at least one reference to The Rent Collector. Cite your reference in MLA format. (use your Rules for Writers text here or OWL.  

These will only be read by me and will not be shared, however, they will be graded and returned to you. 

Homework Due (B): 
-Create a map of the NYC High Line. 

-Include as context, the Whitney Museum, Port Authority Bus Terminal, Penn Station, and Chelsea Market.
-Your map will focus on one of the following on/under or in the immediate vicinity of the Highline
>Things to do happening 9/14/18
>History of the Highline      
>Food      
>Art & music      
>Transportation      
>Bathrooms 

Your map can be made with a computer or hand-drawn. It should be on either graph paper, tracing paper, or plain paper. It must be 8.5x11. It should have an explanation of scale and distortion.

* we'll be visiting The Whitney, The Highline and Chelsea Market

Good Mapping Elements


Global scale map  (True Size!)