Blog for GIS class

in google earth

2009-03-10T21:08:00.000-04:00

with parking lots

2009-03-03T20:58:00.000-05:00

homework

2009-02-25T22:25:00.003-05:00

After dinner sat down with my homework tonight. I figure I don't know whether I need to go in to class on Thursday until I sit down and do it at home and see if there are any problems.

It went pretty straightforwardly. I'm not done yet, but I did figure out how to fill in the blanks in the fields, (oh, i have to be in an edit session). And now all my buildings have names and numbers. Now I just have to give them stories, which seems like it won't be too difficult. And do the parking lots. Not a big deal. No worries.

Here's a picture of what central campus currently looks like.

Campus geodatabase.

2009-02-22T19:21:00.003-05:00

The top image is data frame 1. The bottom image is the geodatabase created from the CAD layer.

I created a raster catalog file, but it turned out blank. I'm not sure what this means, nor how to use it to move on to updating the buildings layer and heads-up digitizing.

progress

2009-02-15T15:13:00.001-05:00

Got my husband to somehow uninstall and reinstall the software. Seems to be working now.

Trying to catch up...

2009-02-14T15:05:00.003-05:00

I asked my husband if I should do the most recent classwork first or attempt to catch up chronologically. He said I should attempt to catch up chronologically, so that I will fully understand the covered material. so I started with module 1. since I missed the first class. I defined the definitions, i took notes of the PowerPoint. I was good and studious. I made it to module 2. I looked over all that material. I read chapter 4 of the textbook. I downloaded the data for the "active learning exercise."

I had bought the textbook with the 60 day trial on Monday. On Tuesday during my dinner break between work and the school board meeting, i installed it. I wasn't around when it finished installing, but i assumed it did OK because it seems to be installed. Today I dug the envelope it was in out of the trash to find the registration code. (oops). typed it in. was conveniently able to register with what appeared to be no problems.

and then I go to open ArcCatalog and I get this message. "ArcGIS Desktop has encountered a serious application error and is unable to continue."

It asks me if I would like to send an error report. And it doesn't open.

I have never installed any GIS software on this particular computer before. This is my husband's old computer.

another why i wasn't in class post.

2009-01-27T21:43:00.001-05:00

just got home from animal control board meeting. had to go to this one. a lot has been happening in the animal control world.

Project 1

2009-01-20T21:05:00.002-05:00

Not sure what to say about this one. People are telling me it looks good, but I think it's a mess. Thankfully the focus here isn't exclusively visual, and note that I managed to pull it off with as few labels and annotations as possible. Yay. That's a relief, anyway.

I did forget to add the real estate disclaimer.

"This map was created for Generic Properties LLC, as a visual representation, based on the best data available. It is not to be used as a property survey, a measure of your exact boundaries, or a treasure map. Do not try to find your way home with it, and do not base your home's site plans on it."

I was going to write a grand satirical real estate disclaimer note. It was going to be funny, unlike the above rather weak attempt.

Anyway, I'm not sure why the manhole covers don't go past AB Tech. No sewer for AB Tech. This is arbitrary and strange. But I figure my hypothetical clients don't care about the sewer lines at AB Tech. Just the ones in Kenilworth.

Subdivision angst

2009-01-18T15:52:00.002-05:00

Yeah, I am definitely downloading "subdivisions" and definitely getting "zoning." It is, of course, Sunday, but I called the GIS office in Asheville and told their answering machine about the problem. (since the phone number was handily in the righthand corner of the web page). Maybe they will even fix it tomorrow and then I can make more progress on homework...

Now in GIS 215

2009-01-18T15:36:00.003-05:00

Every time I try to download the subdivisions file, I end up with the same thing as the zoning file instead. I guess I will try again.

Missed the first day of class. Had some kind of weird stomach virus. Left work early, threw up my lunch, went home & slept a lot.

I'm not sick that often. It just always seems to happen on the first day of class. Which is insanely irritating.

2008-12-27T23:32:00.000-05:00

Finally found the jump drive that had my original bike map on it. damn.

Color

2008-11-18T21:12:00.000-05:00

Explanatory Notes

2008-11-12T21:16:00.003-05:00

In exercise 1 I didn't have a hospitals layer, so I just labelled the cities as if they were hospitals. I figured the point of the exercise was that I could display the H symbol, not that I could find the right layer and put it in my map.

Similarly, in exercises 2-4 I didn't have any watershed data, so I used precipitation zones. I'm sure it looks sort of different, but the things I did to symbolize the layers are the same.

Also, on the challenge problem, the assignment said "show the major roads using the same symboloby as in the South Dakota map we used earlier in this chapter." Since I didn't have the SD_Roads.lyr file, I used the USA layer file that had a particular way of depicting roads on it.

My intention is not to be sloppy with the work, but I figure this is one of those times when being a perfectionist is overrated and the point is to prove that you can display stuff in different ways. and since I accidentally went out of my way and Followed Every Single Step of the entire chapter, when apparantly we were only supposed to do the bits labelled "Exercises" and "Challenge Problem", I feel pretty not guilty about the whole thing.

as far as journal entry goes, not too many thoughts from anna for the moment. just that I'll try to work on that whole paying attention in class thing when the professor is saying something important. ;) Hope your day gets less ughghghgh.

2008-11-11T21:43:00.000-05:00

journal and explanations still forthcoming. going home now, eating snackish dinner, sleeping.

exercises 3,7,8

2008-11-11T21:41:00.005-05:00

journal entry

2008-11-10T23:11:00.000-05:00

journal entry and explanations forthcoming, but for now, going to sleep.

other exercises

2008-11-10T23:08:00.005-05:00

exercises 1 & 2

2008-11-10T23:07:00.002-05:00

Exercises 4, 5, 6

2008-11-10T23:05:00.003-05:00

Exercise 10

2008-11-10T23:04:00.001-05:00

Challenge Problem

2008-11-10T23:02:00.002-05:00

2008-10-29T18:43:00.002-04:00

When you're sitting in class taking a lab quiz is when you remember all the things you don't know how to do.

Pete had showed us the best way to snap an annotation to a wiggly line. It was one of the drawing tools. He made it look easy, but I couldn't find it last night. This is me taking note so I find it in the future.

That's all I can think to put in my journal for now. I didn't think to put my map in the journal last night. Journal wasn't exactly one of my big priorities at the time.

Utter Nerdiness (and a projections assignment)

2008-10-14T20:52:00.004-04:00

so i downloaded the wrong data last week, that's why my map looked funny. but it was the data he told us to download, so it's not my fault.

nice to know that all my troubles this summer and all the gis angst could have been alleviated by one simple tool in arc toolbox and a little bit of understanding of projections.

... so my latest cartographic daydream is all the nifty data i have access to on city of Asheville.

roads
zoning
slope
schools
parks
hospitals
fire stations
airports

... See when I was a kid, SimCity came out. My all-time favorite computer game ever. Yeah, these were the days before World of Warcraft. My brother bought it with his allowance, and I reaped the benefits, and spent many hours poring over maps of Asheville, wishing I could figure out how to reproduce Asheville using SimCity. But the zoning mystified me, and I didn't really know how to tell the difference between commercial and industry, so I shelved that dream.

And now, holy s--t, as an adult I realize all these layers are fully downloadable, complete with coordinates. I could totally do it with accurate zoning, accurate roads, the whole 9 yards.

Projections, Transit maps

2008-10-07T19:24:00.003-04:00

map from projections project
I've been reading a book about the graphic design of urban rail and subway system maps. There was a gas shortage so all the libraries were closed one weekend, so I had to go to the bookstore, and I saw it and thought wow, how interesting.

Anyway, it's totally counterintuitive. The less accurate and topographical these maps become, the clearer. The book talks about 45 degree angles a lot. all the angles in a particular subway schematic might be only 45 degrees or 90 degrees. This is of course very different from the actual angles in real life.

I particularly like the Chicago one. Here's a copy.
http://www.yourcta.com/maps/maps/fwebmaptrain.gif
incidentally, when I googled chicago mta, I found a link to the image which was left by its own designer. wow! His words are here on cartotalk:

http://www.cartotalk.com/index.php?showtopic=840

Bike Map, finished version at end of class on Tuesday 9-23-08

2008-09-23T21:27:00.001-04:00

Bike Map, more progress

2008-09-23T20:13:00.008-04:00

Now we get down to the detail work, where I have this huge map, and it's impossible to see all of it at once, much less know if the labels look ok. one can zoom in, but how do you then know you aren't missing out on some place? i guess that's why we put graticule on the map, huh. so when I zoom in to B1, I can check that off some list and move on to B2. Dang, that's one of the 10 map elements that could be on every map that I didn't remember when I was taking my test. Graticule. What a cool word, maybe I'll remember it now.

Today I remembered my jump drive, but forgot to bring a pencil and my text book. I am not always this crazy. It is really just Tuesdays.

Here is what I have at the moment at several zoom layers. My roads annotation seems to have disappeared again. Sort of weird. It had reappeared last week by the end of class.

Really it looks much the same as it did two weeks ago. Actually I think it looked better two weeks ago. Depressing.

An open letter to Asheville City Transit

2008-09-17T20:14:00.003-04:00

(now that I have your attention. ... I posted this in my comments, but people often forget to read the comments of comments)

Thank you for your feedback, paul -v-.

I created the Asheville Transit layer as part of a final project for an intro to GIS class I took last semester at AB Tech. I was naive and thought it wouldn't be difficult to create! I georeferenced an Asheville City transit map to a Buncombe Streets layer, and then I selected the portions of the streets that overlapped and exported them into the various routes. When I was done with all the routes, I consolidated them all into one layer. I am rather proud of it. There are a few mistakes, the digital equivalent of typos. and I believe I only put the daytime routes on it.

It was very educational and I know much more about Asheville Transit Routes than I did before.

The assignment was to perform some kind of analysis. I compared the transit map to population density information gleaned from 1990 TIGER/Census data and found that while the transit routes match up pretty well with areas of high population density, the Enka-Candler area has a much higher population density than other places that Asheville Transit serves, like Weaverville and Black Mountain. And Asheville Transit only goes to the DMV and then stops. I also applied a buffer -- I think I put it at two miles -- around transit routes, assuming that most folks desperate enough could be reasonably expected to walk two miles to the nearest bus stop. Therefore, I only looked at areas of high pop density which were outside of the 2-mile buffer.

I concluded that while my census data was almost 20 years out of date, it seemed reasonable that the population of the Enka-Candler area has only increased in the last 20 years, and thus is all the more in need of transportation further out Smokey Park Highway than the DMV.

I also looked at the density of elderly folk and renters, those being the closest I could approach to the demographics that might be expected to ride Asheville Transit. And these, too, came out to be high in the Enka-Candler area and indeed higher there than in other places that Asheville Transit does serve.

It was the overambitious naivete of a beginner that caused me to embark on such a project in ArcMap, but it was also that I worked a boring job as a data-entry clerk and it was a great opportunity to come home and apply my brain to something interesting and analytical.

I suppose I should have told someone at Asheville Transit sooner about my results. But then, I was just a data-entry clerk at the time, and my analytical thoughts seemed pretty irrelevent in the grand scheme of things.

Unfortunately I cannot find a copy of the maps or analysis that I turned in as my final project. This is what the Asheville Transit project looked like in its initial stages, before I finished the transit layer and added the buffers:

http://blogforgisclass.blogspot.com/2008/04/oops.html

No Subject

2008-09-09T21:41:00.005-04:00

well, I only got one dot when i attempted to add the x,y data. even though there were tons in the attribute table. does not make sense. nonetheless, my map is beginning to look sorta awesome.

The top picture is zoomed out to buncombe county. the lower one was at what arcmap claimed was "100%" therefore, i assume it best represents the scale that would show in my printed out version.

well, it's a work in progress anyway. light blue is asheville transit routes. purple is bike routes. red is highways.

LEAF, font advice

2008-09-03T19:02:00.005-04:00

Here is my belated LEAF map. I know, it's ugly. I ran out of time to make it less so.

Re: Our lecture on fonts yesterday, if anyone wants advice on fonts, I do carry a lot of them around in my head. Have spent last 4 months trying to figure out what is a good font for a construction business? an ice cream parlor? a Mexican restaurant? a real estate business? a cattle auction business? a political party?

When I first started, I was totally intimidated by fonts, but if you use them, you'll learn them, and you'll learn what works and what doesn't work and messes up when you try to pdf it.

Just skimming off the top of my head, maybe not really very applicable to cartography, some nifty fonts:

delta hey max nine and zorba are two of my personal favorites. These are funky, playful fonts you don't get to use very often.

for a more professional looking font but still one that is artistic looking, I generally go for Californian FB.

for a solid, '90s feel, I go with one of the versions of Futura -- I forget which it is I'm thinking of.

A totally macho, plumbing and power tools and heavy equipment kind of font is Impact.

a classical neoGreek-looking kind of font is Papyrus.

There are a lot of loopy, pretty fonts meant to look cursive-inspired. You can find many of these by going through and trying fonts with French-sounding names. My personal favorite of these though is Marigold. But you have to have pretty large text for it to be properly legible. Another pretty one to sometimes experiment with is Centaur.

Of course, most of the time, (and especially with cartography as opposed to ad design) you are looking for a quieter more toned down font, something that looks professional but doesn't yell it. I don't remember the names of these as well, and there are tons of them. Gill Sans is what you use when you want something like Arial that isn't Arial. Blue Highway is one that is playful but in a quiet kind of way. Bookman and the Berhards and Bernhards are some that are similar to Times New Roman, but aren't Times New Roman, and they can be very attractive. Courier is a typewriter kind of looking font. Palatino and Garamond are nice.

The main thing with fonts is to just be patient. You can picture the font you want in your head. Something which fits your criteria is out there. There are tons of them. You just have to be willing to go through and find it.

2008-09-01T19:53:00.003-04:00

Kigali angst

2008-08-31T22:49:00.007-04:00

Finally figured out how to get the X,Y points into my map, great. Now I just have this small problem that Kigali, Rwanda shows up in Tanzania. I tell the points layer that it needs to be the same coordinate system as the rest of the map. Kigali, Rwanda is still in Tanzania. Also, Bequia is floating out in the middle of the Caribbean.

Oh well, good thing I have Labor Day off work, right. I've been having this sort of thing happen to me all summer, so I guess what else is new, right? If it happens with CAD layers and contour lines, naturally it'll happen with LEAF International villages. I guess I'll sleep on it and try to figure it out in the morning.

Contour Line Angst

2008-08-27T22:35:00.003-04:00

Doing a map of a property in Gaston County, NC. Found a place where I could download contour lines. They're DLG files. And Hypsography translates as contour lines in English, all things we learned in class last semester, but I had to review to re-remember. Lately I've been coming across a lot of data that I download and then it tells me it doesn't have spatial reference information. For instance, this happened with the orthophoto. But I was able to download a grid kind of guide thing and the orthophoto fit in perfectly. The hypsography comes with coordinate boundaries, and on the website, for example, it says Left: -81 degrees 30' 00 ". But this doesn't translate over when I drop it into arc map and I'm left with my contour lines floating out in the middle of nowhere at an extent which says something like Left: -81.250015 ??.

I was thinking I'd be able to just type in the coordinates into somewhere, but this extent with a question mark isn't a changeable field. I search Arc GIS desktop Help for "Extent" but it only wants to tell me about extent rectangles, something I already muddled my way through a few months ago.
of course my contour lines don't contain a damn thing that is georeferenceable. But I'm sure if I knew what to do with the coordinates -- and if I knew how to do the homework from the first day of class that I missed, then I would also know how to use coordinates to map something.

It's got to be the most simple, basic function in arcmap; somewhere you type in coordinates and suddenly it knows where to put your stuff. Did we learn how to do this? And why don't I remember? And why can't I figure out what to search for in Help or where to look in one of my textbooks to figure this out?

Squares, Columns, Visual Hierarchies, Trains

2008-08-26T21:32:00.007-04:00

Since I've been a graphic designer for the past several months, (designing newspaper ads in Quark Xpress--my job interview was the day after the final project was due in 111 [I started reporting only this week, our reporter went on maternity leave and didn't come back]) the visual hierarchies and the white space and the dangers of boxes, end up being eerily deja vu - ish. I'm like, wow, I've been thinking about this stuff all summer (not to mention the maps for the real estate guy).

Anyway, have read the chapter. Haven't done LEAF map yet. Yes, missed the first day of class. Had a urinary tract infection. I'm sure you wanted to know THAT. Was late to class today because the Madison County Government's web site claims the Animal Control Board Meeting is the last Tuesday of even-numbered months. It isn't true. Madison County is teaching me to trust nothing I read on the internet. I sat on a bench in front of the courthouse in the rain for the first hour of class, watching the sky get darker and the rain thicker, listening to trains go by. Fortunately I'd brought a book. Reading "Half of a Yellow Sun" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. So I was reading a fictional account Biafra/Nigeria in the 1960s as I sat in front of the white-columned courthouse with the confederate monument in front of it. No one had showed up by 7 p.m. so I came to class.

Those are my excuses. I'ma go figure out the LEAF map now.

No Title

2008-04-26T13:56:00.002-04:00

I know, I'm being stubborn and choosing to do things the hard way by doing my final project on topic of my own choosing. But I like it that way. That's just the kind of thing I would do.

Oh well. gotta go study for the test.

Terrain Analysis

2008-04-24T19:41:00.005-04:00

Aspect, slope & elevation, Polk County. I chose Polk County because I think that's where the Saluda grade is -- that big steep hill that says you're re-entering the mountains.

Journal Entry

2008-04-20T17:23:00.004-04:00

Oops. I forgot to post a Journal Entry last Thursday. Here's a brief update of the sort of stuff I'm working on on my final project.

Raster Analysis

2008-04-17T21:20:00.003-04:00

note that these are in reverse order. 3, 2, 1

Last Thursday

2008-04-12T17:54:00.004-04:00

Fixing to get started on the Spatial Analyst assignment.

Meanwhile, here's my map from class on Thursday.

It bothers me that I didn't center the title properly, and of course, the border to the locater map is too close to the title, but this are little layout issues and easily fixed.

Edit: Yeah, so it looks like I didn't install the spatial analyst extension. I tried to do it now but the only thing that happened is my computer crashed. It still doesn't appear when I go to activate extensions. I guess I'll show up in the computer lab tuesday after work to do this assignment.

Land Cover-Asheville

2008-04-04T21:34:00.006-04:00

I downloaded a nlcd raster.
Here's the Asheville area. I thought it was kind of pretty.
Wanted to do some analysis on it, but I couldn't use any of the selection tools on it. I guess because it's raster data.

Chapter 12

2008-04-03T20:14:00.006-04:00

I took the suggestion in the book to change the colors on Map B, so that's why it's red and blue.

nowhere

2008-03-20T22:54:00.002-04:00

I realize now that Asheville zip codes are not the same as asheville city limits, so just because Erwin High School is in Asheville according to its street address doesn't mean it is actually in Asheville. I guess it just means it's not in Leicester (whose boundaries would be by zip code because it is unincorporated) and it's not in Asheville (which gets to decide where its boundaries are and i know where they are -- they're where the Welcome to Asheville sign is near the laundromat on Leicester highway). So Asheville zip code is not Asheville city.

Which means Erwin High School is actually ... nowhere.

This is not really related. But a million times I have wished I had a map of Buncombe County's school districts so I knew where the Erwin district melts into the Asheville and Enka districts.

Because that is the community I spent my most formative years identifying with. Not Asheville. Not Leicester. That amorphous consolidation of urban and rural and whatnot that is the Erwin district. Those are my people.

Sorry I was grouchy in class today. Hungry. The actual stuff we were learning was awesome.

My dad is showing up at my house tomorrow at 5 am to go hiking on the AT. He wants to be in north Georgia and on the trail by 8 a.m. great. so if I looked tired in class it was preemptive.

2008-03-13T20:32:00.002-04:00

The movie almost put me to sleep. I took a lot of notes though. Maybe we can blame my continued struggle with adjusting to daylight savings time and not the movie itself.

It's exciting as we move along through our textbook. I just hope I'll remember the useful things I learned today.

I realized my Bent Creek map was faulty. The one you have posted on the door is, I suppose, what they were supposed to look like. I never deleted the raster layer, and I have all my trails in purple. Now that I think about it, I realize I meant to go back and delete the raster layer and change the trails to their different colors. I really did. I guess I got distracted. My husband was trying to get me to watch a movie. Everything is his fault, really.

I guess it would be nice to have some kind of feedback to see how we are doing in terms of grades. Should I fix my Bent Creek map, or is it too late?

chapters 10 & 11

2008-03-13T20:22:00.007-04:00

More random musings

2008-03-11T20:36:00.003-04:00

I know you've all been wondering when I was going to get around to figuring out what to post for my journal for last Thursday's class.

I've been thinking for my project, maybe instead of doing it on unemployment in Scotland County, NC, I'll do an analytical comparison between the locations of jobs in the Asheville area, the public transportation available, and the places where people actually live. It is my hypothesis that Asheville City Transit is designed with the idea that people live in neighborhoods around the city and work downtown. But I hypothesize that in reality most jobs are not downtown and Asheville's model of transportation is actually incredibly impractical for the vast majority of people in Asheville, not to mention the other parts of Buncombe County that it serves.

It will be easy to get population data by census tract, and I can probably georeference the transit map, but the more subjective part of my project will be the locations of jobs. I doubt they have a gis layer already around for that!

I can find the list of the county's top ten or so employers from the employment security commission web site. and then I guess what i'll do is look in the classifieds. Maybe we can assume that if I take a large enough sample of job openings which list physical addresses, then I will have an accurate enough sampling of the locations of jobs.

And if these jobs are new or emerging, even better, then we're developing a transportation map that is prepared for the future.

Of course I'm no expert and I don't know a damn thing about transportation planning, but, it'll be fun. I'll find a few scholarly articles on the subject to add to my footnotes.

Chapters 8 & 9

2008-03-06T21:15:00.006-05:00

2008-03-02T14:51:00.001-05:00

Think I'll do my final project on geographical factors contributing to the high unemployment rate in Scotland County North Carolina as of Dec. 2007.

Bent Creek

2008-03-01T18:52:00.003-05:00

I did the trails in purple because it showed up well.

16C

2008-02-24T20:32:00.002-05:00

When I got done doing 16C, I didn't export it because I was thinking all the changes I'd made had been in the attribute table and not in the actual map. Later I realized the lot numbers had changed, so here it is, somewhat belatedly.

From Florida

2008-02-23T16:56:00.003-05:00

I've finally posted the Chapter 16 exercises. I'm in Florida visiting grandma and have had limited internet access. Got to explain GIS to my mother and other relatives over breakfast. Spent all afternoon navigating a strange city. Now if I could just teach my husband how to read maps while I'm driving ... :)

Chapter 16

2008-02-23T16:50:00.002-05:00

journal post

2008-02-14T20:51:00.002-05:00

Tonight was fun. We got into the more useful specifics of stuff. Where to download maps. How to. Different types of maps and the agencies that have them. Maybe I'll add them as links later.

Now I'm starting to feel like I could actually sit down and start downloading the layers and making the maps, I think maybe I'll try a small initial project when I have time this weekend. I'll go through my sketchbook and pick out a map, something small-scale and daydreamy that's just located to Buncombe County. It prolly won't be real analytical like my final project, but just something fun so I can get more experience and start learning this stuff for myself outside of the textbook. Maybe I'll post it on here if I succeed.

Chapter 15

2008-02-14T20:48:00.002-05:00

Day 3 Journal

2008-02-07T21:11:00.000-05:00

Chapter 19 with all the formatting and snap to grids reminds me very much of learning to use Quark Xpress as a summer intern at the copy desk at the Asheville Citizen-Times.

Oh well. Waffling between idealism and realism. Maybe instead of the Hernando De Soto map, I should do something more pressing in accordance with current reality. I could do some sort of map based around some investigative journalism topic that was geographically based. something to add to the resume.

Well, it seemed like a great idea yesterday. Today all the topics I can think of sound lame and not geographically based.

Chapter 19 Map

2008-02-07T21:07:00.001-05:00

Map Projections

2008-02-07T20:22:00.000-05:00

Interesting

2008-02-04T18:01:00.000-05:00

"National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center/UNCA has a Research Position: Applying Gaming Engines to Decision Making. NEMAC is currently working on the “Decision Theater”, a set of tools and processes to support collaborative group decision-making. Existing tools that might contribute to the Decision Theater include geographical information systems (GIS), 3D gaming engines, and immersive virtual environments such as Second Life. NEMAC has started researching the possibility of combining GIS with various 3D gaming engines and has placed all current research into a wiki located at http://gis-game.pbwiki.com."

Info from UNCA Career Services

GIS 111 Day 2

2008-02-02T09:14:00.000-05:00

I wrote down some questions in my notebook during the lecture and didn't ask them so I figure they're something to put in my journal and I'll come back later and know the answer to them. Here they are:

1. (after the slide showing all the points, lines, and polygons and their coordinate data) Is there some point where we have to type all of that coordinate data in to ArcCatalog?

2. What are the advantages of a TIN? I mean, I know that the book said they store easier than raster data because they're vector data, and they're more accurate than other kinds of vector data like standard contour lines (atleast i think the book said that; i'm working from memory), but when i look at one, it actually looks visually really confusing and difficult to read.

... I guess that's a stupid question and the answer is that you use it for the quantitative information stored into it, not as a visual for your final map. Hence why surveyors would use it.

Chapter 13

2008-01-31T20:59:00.001-05:00

Chapter 4 map

2008-01-26T22:47:00.002-05:00

Who I am and what it has to do with GIS

2008-01-26T13:59:00.001-05:00

This is an introductory sort of post to tell any readers out there who I am and why I care about Geographical Information Systems. If you don't want to know, don't read it. It might be long and boring.

In the fall of 2006, during my short-lived and golden career as a student journalist at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, I was given a press release about the opening of something called the Applied Visualization Lab at AB Tech's Enka Campus.
For the article, I interviewed someone from NEMAC. That is, the National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center. and someone from the NCDC. That is, the National Climactic Data Center.
Listening to these folks talk about how science is using visual tools like GIS to present and analyze information utterly fascinated me. It seemed to me incredibly disappointing that I was doing my undergraduate research with stacks of boring scholarly articles while students on the other side of campus were using these fun interesting research tools, and getting paid for their undergraduate research. Students in mass communication do not get paid to do research.
I wrote down the date of the Applied Visualization Conference on my calendar. A small part of my brain said I would be doing something with GIS some day, and life happened and I didn't go to the conference because I would have had to skip my Mass Communication Law class to go, and I was struggling to pass mass communication law.
GIS and the other visual modeling these folks were talking about reminded me of one of the last projects I did at Swarthmore College before I left Swarthmore so I could move to Asheville North Carolina and get my future husband to fall in love with me.
In the spring of 2004, I took a class called environmental engineering. It was an introductory class I used to fulfill my remaining required science and math credits. In this class, as a final project, we used some sort of visual mathematical modeling software to calculate something relating to populations.
Being at that time fascinated by the economics of homelessness, I used a statistical equation I got from a scholarly article predicting incidence of homelessness based on the demographics of various communities and I applied it to census data on the city of Asheville. (The original equation had been built based on a study of homelessness in New York City).
I can't remember the name of the modeling software we used, but getting to play around with it was the most fun I ever had doing a final project as an undergraduate, (although I have done other fun research projects, including one on Ida B. Wells and one on Iraqi politicians).
It was this experience that led me to decide to pursue civil engineering at AB Tech when I moved back to Asheville.
Of course, civil engineering wasn't nearly as exciting as my environmental engineering class had been. I admit to having zero interest in construction projects. And as the only girl in the entire curriculum and one of only 3 people in the curriculum with a liberal arts background instead of a background of working in construction or road-building, I found myself unable to cope with things like construction estimating.
My parents wanted me to get a bachelor's degree and they were paying for it, so I happily escaped civil engineering and went and became a journalism major at UNCA. I graduated in May 2007. I got married a few weeks later, and my husband and I decided to stay in the Asheville area, thus making it difficult to find journalism positions.
I have been a data-entry clerk since September 2006. This is a boring position, so I have decided to procure a Certificate in GIS. What a journalism graduate who was almost a history major does with a GIS certificate, I'm not sure. But I figure I'll try to entertain myself by doing interesting stuff on my own up until the point where someone decides they want to hire me to do interesting stuff.

Chapter 3 Map

2008-01-24T21:40:00.002-05:00

Day 1 -- GIS 111

2008-01-24T21:30:00.000-05:00

Here is another post about this class

Day 1

2008-01-24T21:22:00.001-05:00

Day 1 of the GIS experience at the grand institution of Asheville Buncombe Technical Community College:

I am currently daydreaming about mapping various things. This is my most prominent GIS research daydream:

When I was a history student at Swarthmore College, I discovered a book called "The De Soto Chronicles", which is a compilation of all the primary source writings on the exploration of Hernando De Soto through the southeastern United States, translated into English. As a resident of Western North Carolina, this matters to me because it is thought to be the first written documentation of Western North Carolina. As an amateur historian, I am fascinated by this text and have read it many times. It is incredibly geographical. And different scholars have produced various different estimations of the path that De Soto and company traveled. But think of what historians could do if they were using GIS software. Not only could they have layers of ecological landmarks -- the contours of the land, the locations of rivers, but someone could also take current knowledge of archaeological sites from the period and add these to the picture, allowing for a more nuanced picture of the world De Soto traveled through and perhaps the ability to link the towns he passed through to really existing archaeological sites of towns. Since GIS allows one to attach notes to certain places, tons of useful information could be embedded in this map. Think of the historical analysis it would allow one to do.

Now I just need to find someone to pay me to do that research. :)