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Placing Covid-19: towards a spatial analysis of the pandemic

Speakers:

Bio: I completed my PhD exploring changing tenure, household structure and spatial polarisation at Manchester in 2016. Since then I have taught in Sociology at Warwick and Geography at Nottingham. I recently joined the UK Data Service. Before studying I worked for the Audit Commission on performance assessment and improvement with organisations and partnerships across local government, health and criminal justice agencies.

Bio: "I first encountered Census data in 1995, working as a placement student for a year at Midas (Manchester Information, Data and Associated Services) within the University of Manchester. I was asked back when my degree had completed and initially worked as maternity cover, programming an object oriented database for the SuperJournal project. That was in 1997, Midas then became Mimas, my job changed to become infrastructure and programming support on Census data, then moved to International Time Series data as part of UKDS but still working within the University of Manchester, then when the unit moved to Jisc my role increased to become encompass training for aggregate data. My role now is as senior technical co-ordinator for aggregate data within the UK Data Service, looking after a team of 4 technical staff who are responsible for the ingest of data to our systems and the hardware and software infrastructure on which it sits. In my career I have been lucky worked on ground breaking interfaces such as Casweb, GeoConvert and DotStat and taken part in shared projects that have led to advances in UK Census Outputs, Open Geospatial Consortium APIs, e-Social Science and international data co-operation such as the SIS-CC."

This workshop introduces ecological analysis to explore demographic characteristics of places and explain uneven patterns of social phenomena. We model the association between Covid cases; and deprivation; occupation; ethnic diversity; housing conditions and age profile to illustrate the power of ecological analysis. On completion of the workshop; you will appreciate the statistical geography of England; the data available from standard census tables and be able to extract relevant indicators from them; explore their spatial distribution and develop a statistical model for the rate of Covid cases by local area in England. The workshop uses the GeoDa software; a user-friendly interactive tool to analyse spatial data. The skills and knowledge you develop will inform future spatial analyses of social phenomena using data from the 2021 census when this becomes available. We will provide materials for you to explore your own research questions and be available to answer questions during the festival.