This elective course is designed as a vehicle for the exploration of current interdisciplinary knowledge on social justice issues in Sydney. This course aims is a new blended learning course teaching ‘small data’ research and digital mapping skills, while also producing an online portal with ‘real world’ value. As well as the educational benefits of a course that produces a public resource of real social value, the focus on ‘small data’ skills addresses a weakness in the popular smart cities movement. Driven by the growth in computing power and big data sets, the smart cities movement often focuses on making use of available data, rather than developing new data sets. This often leads to a ‘streetlight’ effect, where researchers focus on issues that are easy to investigate, rather than those in most need of attention. This course will help to overcome this deficiency, by teaching students the importance of less visible issues, and providing the technological, social and spatial skills needed to bring these issues to light online. This course will introduce students to quick and effective technical methods for gathering spatial information and in turn, processing this information with geospatial and graphic tools to reveal patterns and produce maps. It will draw on materials from a range of disciplinary perspectives including urban planning, urban design, geography, architectural theory, sociology and media theory.
