CDP Mapping Systems

Course materials for CDP Mapping Systems at Columbia GSAPP's Computational Design Practices program.

All course content lives in content/ and is available at the course website:

• content/Syllabus/ — syllabus and schedule
• content/Tutorials/ — Jupyter notebooks worked through in class
• content/Assignments/ — assignment briefs

To run the tutorials locally, see content/Assignments/00_Getting_Started.md.

Maintaining course resources

Three external sources feed the site:

• are.na channels → /resources/<slug> (masonry card grid)
• GitHub Star Lists → /resources/<slug> (repo card grid)
• Zotero collection → /bibliography (Chicago Author-Date, with sub-collection sections and search)

Configure all three in resources.config.ts. Credentials live in .env (gitignored) — copy .env.example to get started. Are.na and Zotero public sources work unauthenticated; GitHub Lists always need a token (GITHUB_TOKEN=$(gh auth token) is the quickest path).

To refresh and commit:

npm run build:resources   # fetch arena + github + zotero
git add src/content/resources/ src/data/
git commit -m "refresh: resources"
git push

Cloudflare doesn't fetch from any of these — it just serves what's committed. Refresh whenever you add to a channel, list, or Zotero collection.

To refresh one source at a time:

npm run build:arena
npm run build:github
npm run build:zotero

Inline citations

In any lesson markdown (.md file or notebook markdown cell), write pandoc-style citations using the Zotero BibTeX citation key as the identifier:

A foundational text on cartographic semiotics [@bertinSemiologyGraphicsDiagrams2011]
sets the visual variables we still use today.

This renders as (Bertin 2011), linked to /bibliography#bib-bertinSemiologyGraphicsDiagrams2011. Clicking the citation lands on the matching entry on the bibliography page; if the page's tag/search filter is active and would have hidden the entry, the filter clears so the entry is visible, and the entry briefly highlights.

The citation key comes from Zotero, not the alphanumeric "Item Key". To find or set it: open the item in Zotero, look in the right-hand metadata panel for the Citation Key field. Patterns like surnameTitlefragmentYear (e.g., bertinSemiologyGraphicsDiagrams2011) are typical; the Better BibTeX plugin generates these automatically.