From Data to Story: Using QGIS Expressions with OSM

Being a data journalist, it’s not enough to ‘just use’ tools – You also need to come up with a story. As a reporter for a magazine, I have extensively used QGIS to report on news stories. The workshop is designed for any interested participant to get started with maps and cartography on QGIS. But, we are not going to ‘just use’ the tool – we are going to map how uneven is the social infrastructure distribution of Bengaluru – is one neighbourhood hogging most of the green shade in the city? Does Devara Jeevanahalli have any schools? How many police stations does Bengaluru have and more importantly where are they located?

For all those questions, thankfully we have Open Street Maps and QGIS Expressions to make sense of the data. By the end of the workshop, participants will know their way around the QGIS interface and not just use the tool but make informed decisions using QGIS expressions for querying – thanks to AI. Finally, there is the cartographic aspect of it – we would visualise the skewed distribution map and walk through the steps involved in exporting the map in QGIS.

We probably won’t be Tom Patterson but the most important takeaway from the workshop would be not to get fazed the next time we come across a file with a ‘.shp’ format. Rather, just go ahead and ‘drag it from the Browser Panel’ and ‘drop it in the Layers Panel’. All fancy words but we are going to try to dumb down all the nitty gritties of how to practically use QGIS.