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-# intro_to_geospatial_carto
-A brief OER lab/course intended to give Undergraduates a basic orientation to geospatial data using the carto platform
+This repository contains the contents of a short open course designed by Jeremy H. Kidwell at the University of Birmingham. The course is meant to provide a hands-on introduction to visualising geospatial data using the [Carto](https://carto.com) platform. This should be useful for a wide audience, but was originally designed for Undergraduate students with a humanities background. As you will see below, the course is designed around "challenges" which build on one another.
+
+The course here has been compiled with [bookdown](https://github.com/rstudio/bookdown), and so the live instance of the course is compiled from openly accessible resources located in this repository. If you're interested in doing something similar, there are a number of good options, including: [gitbook](https://docs.gitbook.com/), [mkdocs](https://www.mkdocs.org/), [readthedocs](https://readthedocs.org) which technically uses [Sphinx](http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/) or [daux](https://daux.io/).
+
+Directory structure includes:
+* `README.md` this README file displayed on Github
+* `docs` a folder containing the compiled book in html, .pdf and epub formats
+* `course.bib` a bibliography of items used for the course in [BibTeX format](http://www.bibtex.org/Format/)
+* `index.Rmd` Contains initialization settings, and preface content
+* `00-Overview.Rmd` Introduction and overview to course
+* `01-Session1.Rmd` Challenge 1: Find yourself on the map
+* `02-Session2.Rmd` Challenge 2: Work with existing data
+* `03-Session3.Rmd` Challenge 3: Find some additional data sets
+* `04-Session4.Rmd` Challenge 4: Generate a geospatial visualisation
+
+Content here, unless otherwise indicated are copyright by Jeremy H. Kidwell. But please re-use them as they are covered by [Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0).
+
+# How to produce 'books' from this repository using bookdown
+
+1. Clone this repository so you have a local directory to work with
+2. You can use `make` from the command line, which calls the `Makefile` provided here OR
+3. Working in R Studio, load the `bookdown` library, and then from within the root directory of this repo, invoke the command `bookdown::render_book("index.Rmd", "bookdown::gitbook")`