Kartoza - Workshop - Making Your Own Maps for Publication Using QGIS

The Society of South African Geographers (SSAG) held its biennial conference at the University of Pretoria on September 12-14, 2022. It's their first in-person conference since COVID-19 lockdowns.

The conference featured keynote speakers who discussed their research, roundtable discussions on South Africa's New Energy Action Plan and workshops on GIS. Various topics were presented in the GIS workshops, where participants could learn more about using GIS in their academic research or workplace. Kartoza had the opportunity to present a short workshop at the conference.

Kartoza’s workshop was a short introduction to QGIS and how it can be used to make maps for academic papers, for instance. The workshop was attended by sixteen participants, all from different backgrounds, including academics, government GIS surveyors and analysts, and final-year and postgraduate students.

The workshop provided participants with a brief introduction to the QGIS user interface and how to navigate it. This was followed by an introduction to a case study that introduced simple digitisation of a theme park in Gqeberha in the Eastern Cape Province. The final phase of the workshop was to demonstrate the functioning of the QGIS Layout Manager and the number of features that make mapping efficient, simple, and clean.

The workshop gave participants a preview of how open-source software like QGIS can be used not only to create maps, but also to carry out various GIS analyses.

It was a pleasure working with Riley Kamstra (former Kartoza intern) in the workshop😊.