Frequently Asked Questions

Starting July 2018, the CGA no longer runs regular GIS helpdesks. You may submit your request for assistance here.

In addition, the Harvard Map Collection at the Pusey Library offers walk-in helpdesk style assistance from 10:30am to 4:30pm; and the Frances Loeb Library at the Graduate School of Design offers staff assistance during regular hours when school is in session.

Here is a tutorial on how to make maps in R, created by the CGA and Civilytics.

Login to ArcGIS Online > Navigate to Content tab > Click on 'New Item' button > Select Imagery Layer option > Upload GeoTIFF. This workflow is outlined in this documentation: https://doc.arcgis.com/en/arcgis-online/manage-data/publish-imagery-layers.htm.

Please see https://gis.harvard.edu/arcgis-online on how to login to Harvard's ArcGIS Online organization using your HaervardKey. In case your ArcGIS Online account does not have the ArcGIS Image extension, please request it by filling out this form: https://gis.harvard.edu/contactus.

Read this tutorial: How_to_extract_businesses_from_Business_Analsyt_Online.pdf

For Harvard affiliates, follow instructions in this tutorial.

See this document

 

For a tutorial on how to use Layout in ArcGIS Pro with links to other tutorials, please see this document:

Acknowledgement: To aid us in tracking the impact of our consulting and support services, we request that you include a short acknowledgement in your publications and/or talk. Such support may include but is not limited to:

• Project planning: study design and tools
• Data organization: sharing and secure storage
• Data processing / extraction / transformation / integration
• Selection and interpretation of geospatial methods/algorithms
• Using high performance computing (e.g., RCE, AWS)
• Visualization: cartographic products, dashboards, animated maps, etc.

You may wish to amend the following text to reflect the type of support you received (e.g., programming support, technical support, data processing/analysis/extraction).

<support type> provided by <CGA staff name(s)>, Center for Geographic Analysis, Harvard University."

Authorship: For any intellectual contributions provided by CGA staff on a project, we advise that the staff who performs the work receives co-author credit on all resulting research output (e.g., publications, talks, posters, documents). Such contribution may include but is not limited to:

• Writing reproducible code/algorithm
• Design and development of a geospatial model
• Visualization of raw data and model output
• Interpretation of results
• Writing methods and results sections of papers
• Creating maps / illustrations
• Responding to peer-reviews of our analyses

We encourage you to email your publication titles to contact @ cga.harvard.edu, so we can include them in our list of research output.

The SharePoint Documents in 'Center for Geographic Analysis, Harvard University' contain three types of files:

1. Public files, which anyone may access without restriction.
2. Organizational files, which Harvard people may access by login with your Harvard ID and Key.
3. Restricted files, which only CGA staff may access through named accounts.

If you encounter a problem when trying to access any organizational file, please first check to make sure that you have logged in to your Harvard Microsoft 365 account. If you don't have such an account, please visit https://huit.harvard.edu/microsoft-365 to create one. 

If you still encounter problems after proper login, please send a screenshot showing your problem, including the URL which let you to the CGA SharePoint site, and specify which particular file you need access to, via https://gis.harvard.edu/contactus. We will verify/correct the permission setting of that file, or send the file to you directly if appropriate.

Every ArcGIS Online user receives a default 4000 credits in their Harvard account (was 2000 prior to Oct.11,2023). We can allocate more credits to support your work if needed. When you run out of the initial default number of credits in your account, we add 5000 more for you without you asking. However, if you run out of that again, you will need to tell us how many more credits you still need to complete your work, before we can add more for you. The market value is 10c per credit. Fortunately, Harvard's site license with Esri allows us to pool our credits together for all users in the university, and most users don't need many credits, thus a small number of users can have many more without additional cost. But we want to use credits efficiently so not to run out of credits for the entire organization. Please learn more about AGOL credits and how to estimate credit consumptions here, and then let us know roughly how many more credits you still need, via this form. We will add what you need to your account.