AEA365 began on January 1, 2010. Before we promoted this resource, we reached out to dedicated authors who believed in the project in order to populate the site with starter content. Those who contributed in week 1 wrote for an audience of fewer than 10. One year later we have over 1500 subscribers and are re-posting the contributions from those trailblazers in order to ensure that they receive the readership they deserve.

Hello my name is Tarek Azzam and I am an assistant research faculty member at Claremont Graduate University. I am interested in incorporating geography into our evaluation analysis, and reporting. I’ve found many tools that can help us do this through the use of GIS enabled websites like maps.google.com and many-eyes.com.

Hot Tip: you can use google to create maps that help you represent the location of different program sites, within these maps you can include information about the program performance through written descriptions or by color coding the icons to indicate high or low levels of performance (e.g. red icons=poor performance, green icons=excellent performance). Google maps also provides a street view of the neighborhoods that you can use to get a sense of the community condition. Website: maps.google.com

Hot Tip: many-eyes.com is a website that allows you to create interactive GIS maps with data you collect. For example, you can map changes in academic performance across various counties in a state by importing this data from an excel sheet into Many-eyes.com. The GIS software will create a color coded map that shows you how different counties performed on this indicator (typically the darker the color the higher the performance). This gives you a quick visual of how the program might have influenced different geographic regions (and may drive additional inquiry). Website: many-eyes.com

Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.