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Department of Spatial Planning

Contribution to the Dortmund Data Literacy Certificate Programme

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The Department of Statistics of TU Dortmund University offers an extracurricular certificate that equips students from all disciplines with critical skills in handling data, reading statistics, and communicating data-based research and empirical results. Our colleague René Westerholt contributed a lecture on the topic of geographical data with a special focus on their statistical analysis. Starting with fundamentals of geographic data acquisition including coordinate reference systems, the lecture provided students with an overview of the special characteristics that are unique to geographic data. Examples include issues of actual sample size (number of spatial units versus only one map pattern), the fact that associations are the norm in geographic space (even under random conditions), the need to select and model an appropriate space concept (as competing space concepts exist in geography), and others. This conceptual overview was followed by exemplary demonstrations of typical, widely used methods from the toolboxes of exploratory/confirmatory spatial data analysis and spatial econometrics. The range of lectures offered by the Spatial Modelling Lab complements the certificate programme, which also offers data-related considerations from philosophical, sports science, and journalistic perspectives, among others.