When building my fictional house, I discovered that I’m not quite as good at rendering 3D models as others. I was quite proud of my structure, and then I saw some other people’s and my attitude toward my house significantly changed. Nevertheless, I decided not to change it dramatically.

Google Sketch Up, however, is an extremely easy program to use, and it’s free. It’s very user friendly and self-explanatory, and I recommend it.

My problems lied with uploading it to the website. I couldn’t for the life of me get it to work, no matter what I did or what I wanted to do. It drove me absolutely crazy. The simple-to-use-gadget should have worked easily, but sadly it didn’t. With some help, I was finally able to pull it off. Below you can see the structure I made!

I’m actually really surprised that a program like Unlead GIF Animator (which is what we used) costs money to use. Luckily they give us a 15 day free trial, so we were able to do all of our animations. Here’s the basic outline of what we had to do in GIF Animator:

First, under File, there’s something called the Animation Wizard. Select that.

Next, select the size of the image you wish to animate. Meaning, you must make sure it is the same resolution and size as ALL the GIF files that were hopefully exported as the same size (luckily mine were!).

Then, select all the GIF files that created as maps and put them in order of which ones you want to animate, making sure they are all in order.

Finally, select the speed in which you want it to animate. I selected 200 for each of my maps.

And that’s all! The wizard makes it extremely easy. I was able to do all this all on my own. As for other functions of the program, I’m going to be quite honest and say that I didn’t do any exploring with anything else other than the basic animation I made….

The final step for this lab was putting my animations on my website. A very simple task for us now. Ahh…..I can remember when such a task was daunting just a few months ago!

First, I ran into the problem of properly formatting my maps. Since this is on the web, I was given a lot more freedom to do what I wanted as far as how I wanted to shape the layout besides a sheet of paper in either landscape or portrait. However, I’m still limited to what a browser can show, and not everybody has nice, giant monitors. I needed to make sure that it could fit onto one screen for even the smaller-monitored people out there (yes, I said monitored people).  I ended up making it smaller than a sheet of paper but kept it at a nice, big size. I originally kept making it too small and you couldn’t read the legend very well, so I solved that by making it larger and increasing the size of the legend. Among sizing the map, I had to make sure to make it look presentable and professional, since this will be the last time I’ll be working with the maps in ArcMap. I made sure I was happy with all my colors, titles, placement, size, and just everything you can think of, all the while making sure everything is in the SAME EXACT PLACE (like the title and legend) so my animation works properly when finished. I tried to keep mine extremely simple. I could have added city names or roads layers to my map, but I didn’t think it was relevant to the map reader to know where roads are in a population change map. So that’s my justification.

Another decision/problem I came across was what I was going to do with my legend. I decided, against the advising of lab worksheet, to keep my legend in each individual map instead of exporting it as a separate file. I did this knowing I could potentially accidentally move it during the exporting process, and thus screw up my animation, but I was extremely careful not to do so, and everything should be fine. I’ve double checked and didn’t come across any noticeable problems, but I guess the real test will be what happens in Lab 9.

When it came time for me to test my newly exported GIF files on my webpage to make sure everything was showing and no problems like that occured, I ran into the problem of not being able to get it to show up on my website. After tinkering around in Kompozer and WFS_TP, I finally got it to show up and there were no problems

That about covers things today. I have one more problem I’m currently working on relating to this lab, and that’s exporting the Proportional Symbols maps I made. I can’t get the legend to look right and until I do, I won’t be exporting it. But once I do, I shall export away!

Au revoir for now!

For the second half of this lab, I needed to take the data from the maps in from my previous post (using the Natural Breaks method) and reclassify everything to fit into a series of Choropleth Maps, Graduated Symbols Maps, Proportional Symbols Maps, and Dot Density Maps. I’ll talk about each of these types one at a time.

My Choropleth Maps:

First, my Choropleth Maps. I simply just refer to them as this (which they are), but keep in mind that the Natural Breaks maps in my previous post are also choropleth maps. What’s different about these is that I defined the classification scheme. Now, the natural breaks in my previous blog each contain a completely different classification scheme. The hard part here was that I had to create one, common scheme that fits each of these maps. I had to observe my data up and down through using the histograms ArcGIS can so conveneintly display. After testing and re-testing different user-defined schemes I made, I finally setteled on one. These choropleth maps display the percent population change from decade to decade over the past century. So, I divided my scheme into eight classes (a lot for a maps) that broke down as -100% or lower, -99% to -30%, -29-0, 1-10, 11-25, 26-40, 41-90, and 91 and above, because most of my data lied within  negative 30% to positive 50%, which a couple lower outliers and infrequent (yet still enough to break down further) data ranging higher than 50% on my histograms. My three states were pretty evenly split with gain and loss of population, so this is why I chose a whopping eight classes. However, on any one of the 11 maps, only 6-7 are ever once displayed. It varies which ones based on how much the percent change was. Additionally, I spent a very significant amount of time choosing my color scheme. I wanted it to be as perfect as I could get it and I didn’t stop until I was completely satisfied. Took me almost two hours of tinkering to get it right, so I hope you approve of my choices!

Rough example of a choropleth map

My Graduated Symbols Maps:

Graduated symbols are symbols that show various amounts of data on maps using 3-5 classes. The symbol can be anything the cartographer decides to use (I chose purple circles) and they vary in size for each class. Usually, the smaller the symbol, the less it represents. In the case of our subject, graduated symbols can only show hard data. This means I cannot show percent population change like I did with the choropleth maps; I can only show the actual population numbers for each year. I chose to use 4 different classes and had to fiddle with the sizes so that each one was distinguishable very easily from the others, otherwise it can make reading the map very difficult if you have to try to figure out which circle is bigger from another. I also had to figure out a way so that they aren’t TOO big and cover up the actual shape of the states, making it difficult to read. Took me some time. Just like the choropleth maps, I had to create a common classification scheme across each of the 12 maps (one for each Census year + 2008). This once again was the most challenging part of this, and I ultimately settled on four number of classes that represent logical breaks in my data for ALL the years. This was difficult because I have so many counties that are very low in population, but a few that are extremely populated. Because of this, my breaks are skewed toward lower numbers in population size relative to the highly populated counties. My highest break is 100,000 and up, so my scheme looks something like 0-9999, 10000-24999, 25000-99999, and 100,000+.

Rough example of a graduated symbols map

My Proportional Symbols Maps:

Proportional symbols maps are strange in that I don’t have much control over them. Like graduated symbols, they can only display hard data (so no percent change again). All I did was create a common size for them (this doesn’t affect the size the computer chooses to show the proportionality of them, if that makes any sense at all…). I also chose to use green circles for my symbols. Honestly, anything other than circles looks silly to me, at least in representing population. I’m sure there are other subjects, like mapping the number of volcanoes in all the countries around the world, where a shape like a triangle would be more appropriate, but not for population. These maps look similar to graduated symbols maps, but really aren’t. The computer proportionally creates symbols sizes that best show the difference between highly and lowly populated areas. This means the schemes will all be different for each map, so in the future, this map type will not be animated because there is no classification continuity between them (similar to the natural breaks maps).

Rough example of a proportional symbols map

My Dot Density Maps:

Dot density maps are also hard data users, so again, no percent change. The dots on my maps each represent 2,000 people throughout all 12 maps. You guessed it! That means I had to choose that number because it best represents the data for ALL the maps, so even though I could have had more dots (representing more people each) on the lower number years in the century, it would have been far too busy and created clustering, making the dots indistinguishible from each other in highly populated areas. This is a bad thing. I made my dots a really dark blue over a sandy colored state-shape for optimal viewing (at least I hope) and made the dots really small in size.

Rough example of a dot density map

That’s my word for this lab. I ran into the worst problems yet this semester. Let me just try to begin to explain…

First, as I believe I have mentioned before, my data for Virginia that I received from the Census apparently counts cities which it subjectively selects as highly populated separately from the county population data. That means that Richmond, Virginia, would not be counted in the county population data it is within. Who wants a map population map that doesn’t include the most densly populated areas of a state!? So, having realized this back in Lab 5, I decided to ignore it because I was advised by a few people not to worry about it (including my professor). This was after I had already connected the data I entered into Excel to the ArcMap shapefile, so that’s probably why I was told not to bother. Well, I was relieved at the time I didn’t have to go back and do that (because it is indeed time-consuming), but it started to bug me more and more and time progressed. Still, I sucked it up and continued on.

Well, Lab 6 rolls around (which there is no blog about; it was our midterm) and I’m stuck evaluating my work via my midterm. I mostly came to the conclusion that I should probably enter this city data for Virginia (around 30 cities) and Baltimore, Maryland, into the rest of my data–but I still wasn’t 100 percent certain I would or should do that.

So then Lab 7 comes, and I notice that while doing my maps, there is so little change between decades for my data for Virginia that I simply MUST go back and enter the city data. Most of the population fluctuations are going to occur in cities and urban areas, which weren’t represented on my map. After an near-mental breakdown of wanting to kick myself for not including it in the first place (Hey, I was apprehensive! This was supposed to COUNTY data in our maps, not county with some city data!), I needed to backtrack to Lab 4. Yeah….after nearly finishing Lab 7, I had to go back to Lab 4 and begin again with putting my data into Excel all over again. You can only begin to imagine my discourgement and frustration with everything. Getting THAT far behind wasn’t something I wanted to do at all.

Now that I’ve explained why it’s been nearly a month since my last post, I can finally talk to you about the first part of Lab 7 which I have finished today (the first part, not the second….)

So, basically for the first part of this lab we had to take the population change we calculated in ArcMap in Lab 6 between Census years (starting from 1990 through 2000, then the estimates in 2008) and make choropleth maps for each decade, for a total of eleven maps. These maps simply had to use the Natural Breaks/Jenks method of classification with 5 classes, then use Gimp to crop miniature versions of these maps to share in our blogs. Well, I had the problem of these maps being way too small to read, so I kept them at a fairly large size, so I apologize for that; I wanted everyone to be able to read the legend.

Here are those eleven maps. Remember, these are just informal maps made fairly quickly for posting in the blog. By  no means are my cartographic skills so careless .

With Natural Breaks, the computer divides the classes up for you, based on, well, the natural breaks in the data. If you’re comparing maps like these eleven using the Natural Breaks method (which is also called the Jenks method), the data may not be accurately depicted because each map is different. Also, I  could confuse you even more if I were to have each of these contain a different number of classes (which these don’t; they only contain five). There are many ways to show map data, so you have to be very careful when reading maps. Anything can be misleading or skewed to show you something the cartographer wants you to see. Map series should be uniform.

You can, of course, make a common classification scheme for all of the data, but then I would be using a User Defined method of classification, which isn’t the Jenks method. This is eventually what I’m going to be doing in the second part of this lab: Creating ONE classification scheme for all the maps, so that when viewing the data, it will all be nice and easy to understand (and most importantly: not misleading).

Below are three more maps to demonstrate how different schemes can show you an almost completely different map. The map is the same for all three (change in population between 2000 and 2008), but they each have a different classification scheme: Natural Breaks, Quantile, and Equal Interval.

I hope this demonstrates just how easy it is to lie or mislead with maps. I often think most people don’t realize just how easy it is to lie with maps. There are entire books about this subject matter, and many people study World War II propaganda maps made by the Nazis. It’s a pretty interesting subject, actually, so if you’re really bored one day, you should check it out
I’ll be back tomorrow to post the results of the second part of the lab!

Anyway, the DEM assignment of ours was pretty fun and not very difficult to complete. This was the first time I worked with DEM data (Digital Elevation Model). This assignment, which wasn’t a lab, introduced me to a program called 3DEM. It was a basic program, but still very powerful in its capabilities.

This assignment also had us working with the Seamless National Data Server, which is a VERY good resource for a plethora of types of data one can get regarding the United States. It’s run by the USGS. It’s also clunky as hell. It’s a very good resource, but poorly designed, not-so-good-working website, but at least I got what I needed from it. Those are my complaints about the server, but still…I can’t deny how much data you can get from it. It’s truly amazing. I only took the DEM and DRG data.

Time for some more vocab!

DEM: A digital elevation model, which uses shading and coloring or other methods to show the elevation of a particular landscape.

DRG: Digital raster graphics. DRG data can be overlayed on top of a DEM to show things like roads, rivers, contour lines, and more.

Hillshading: A shading technique used on DEM to show hills, slopes, mountains and more by using a shading technique. Almost like shaded relief.

Okay, and I also wanted to briefly touch on an update about Lab 5. I ended up finishing it on time, but I had the problem of cities showing up separately from the county data, therefore NOT INCLUDED in the county data. And only bigger cities. And it seems to only be Virginia. My professor and I are guessing it has to do with the way Virginia does their census or….something. The whole thing is weird. So now I have to choose if I want to just continue as is and have inaccurately reflected county population data because all of the counties’ LARGEST cities won’t be included, OR I can add the city data and have it be included in my upcoming projects (although still separate from the county population data) while doing through the ARDUOUS task of adding the cities properly.

Something I really need to ponder….

Now, I’m not actually saying I had hours of frustration with this lab; it actually went pretty smoothly. I’m just saying this as a general statement. It pays off!

Before I started this lab, I had to fix up my data from the third lab. My Virginia data was a little messed up because my 2000 and 2008 data just wouldn’t line up correctly with the 1900-1990 data (for some reason, about 6 or 7 counties were missing….my professor told me that they made have redrawn the counties….but….can they do that?!). I put it off back when I did lab three, but now is the time I had to make it right for real! So I finally got around to asking for help and easily fixed it up. It was somewhat tedious, however. No big deal though; I’m just glad it was okay that I didn’t have data for every county for the years 2000 and 2008.

Now, for actual lab 5, I hardly had any problems, save the Field Calculator (which I explain below). What we had to do was take the Census data from lab 3 and upload it into ArcMap. So, first I opened a provided shapefile of the United States. Then, by selecting by attributes (using state names), I created a new layer for Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware. Then, I opened added the data and to my surprise, I didn’t run into any problems! I couldn’t believe it, but I’m going to attribute the success to my meticulous and careful work from adding the data to Excel. Seriously, I quadruple checked every column for every state to make sure everything was okay so I didn’t run into any future problems. I think it paid off! I then chose a projection I thought to be appropriate for these three states, and settled on the predefined North American projection called NAD 1983 Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Albers.

The Field Calculator in ArcMap brought back even more memories from GIS. Aaaaannnnnddd it ended up being the hardest part of the lab for me. I had forgotten about this feature even though I used it somewhat frequently when I took intro to GIS, but now I barely remember how to use it. I created a new field in the attribute table for my states’ layer, but I didn’t get much done past that. I couldn’t get the Field Calculator to do anything I wanted it to do. I also got confused, because most of the things I could select all said “Sheet 1″ before them, and I didn’t know why. I think it has something to do with when I selected the Excel file to add, but I’m not sure. This was a problem because whenever I selected a feild to put into an equation, it would always look like this: [Sheet1$.Y1910]  instead of this: [Y1910] . I didn’t like that one bit. I will have to get help with this the next time I am able to do so.

It’s good I’m keeping fresh with all this stuff, though. I need to become as familiar with ArcMap as possible if I’m ever going to make it :p

Time for some Vocab!

Join Function: the join function in ArcMap joins data from a selected layer and joins them to another layer using at least one common field (in this lab’s case, it was FIPS) to create a single attribute table with both datasets.

Monitor Fire: the process of your monitor catching on fire if your joining of data did not join correctly; a very terrible dilemma that no one should ever experience.

Calculate/Field Calculator: calculating fields using the field calculator is a way to, essentially, use ArcMap as Excel to calculate differences/change/etc. between fields in an attribute table to create new ones (such as population change like I trying to do).

That’s about it. I hope to finish the Field Calculator business before the lab is due tomorrow, and I shall update my blog when I do. Next on the agenda is a class assignment that is going to actually add something to my website, so be sure to check that out after I blog about it! I will be updating my website as a whole as I do that, hopefully with pictures and information about my states, so look forward to that! After that we have Lab 6, which is actually our midterm! Yikes! Not only is it scary that I have a midterm coming up, but the fact that we are in midterm week already is pretty mindblowing. I could have sworn I just started this semester like, uh, yesterday. Time goes too fast…..

I’m a little late with this one….which sucks because I didn’t have to be. I had most of it finished in the first place, but just never got around to finishing up the last couple steps or blogging about it.

This lab was pretty neat. I really haven’t disliked any of the labs so far. They’ve all been stuff I enjoy doing. I was actually surprised by how easy this lab ended up being for me. Perhaps I learned more from my Intro to GIS class than I previously though (and I never thought I didn’t learn anything before ).

First, I was to play around with a world map shape file we were provided and select a projection I thought was intriguing. After searching through each one of them multiple times–from the most conservative to the most bizarre projections–I decided to settle on one I thought was pretty aesthetically pleasing, but not fully traditional as it does contain a lot of distortion (save Africa). Below is the map with world population density mapped using the Jenks/natural breaks classification scheme. The second picture is the same map, but with major world rivers also included.

World Population Density

World Population Density with Rivers

Next, we had to clip our selected state or states out of a shapefile of the United States. When I was doing the lab, I thought I was going to need to clip each state individually. So, I clipped out Maryland first and later found out that I should have dona all three of my states at once :p . But I got the okay that for these quick little maps I’m about to post, it was okay to just have one state. After all, I’m the only one in the class who is doing more than one anyway

Below are three quick maps of Maryland with different data mapped. The first one maps out total Hispanic density throughout the state, the second one maps out the density of people to have never been married, and the third one maps out the distribution of males in the state. All these are mapped by county and using the Jenks classification scheme. As a side note, generally the darker the color, the more dense.

Maryland Hispanics Density

Maryland Males Density

That concludes the activities used with ArcGIS. The next part of the lab consisted of writing up this blog and including some interesting things I learned while using ArcMap as well as some additional things while visiting ESRI’s website. ESRI is the maker of the ArcGIS application suite.

ArcMap is an interesting program. I was able to intimitely get to know the program last semester in my GIS class, so not a whole lot of what we did with the program was new to me. I needed to freshen up my memory a bit, but I got it. So, I guess I’ll say what interested me about the program when I first usedthe features we used for this lab for the first time.

First, Selecting by Attributes is always fun. It has always intrigued me how this works. The ability to basically select anything, making new layers, and using the “Get Unique Values” button is pretty slick, and when I first used it last semester, I think it was when I realized just how much potential and power GIS software can have. Similarly, clipping features is equally interesting and provides with accurate and precise means to get the picture and map you want.

Going to ESRI’s website, I quickly found the products page and hastily visited. I wanted to see everything they make because I was always curious anyway. Among many interesting forms of GIS, such as Desktop (what I’m using) and Server, I noticed they have Mobile GIS. This intrigues me and I’d like to get to know more about it. It seems like a really awesome tool for use in the field. I’d like to see this unit someday just to play around with it. Another thing I was hunting for were job opportunities. Graduating soon means I need to find a place to work, and ESRI has always been on the back of my mind. I decided to just explore the site for that and came across their Careers page (http://careers.esri.com/). Needless to say, I was surprised to see this much information, and you can bet I’ll be back in the future, especially when I’m closer to graduating, looking more deeply into this.

That concludes my blog about Lab 4. Phew. I made this one pretty lengthy. Hope it was worth it!

The lab consisted of taking the Census data we had for our states and making it nice and neat in Microsoft Excel. I have three states, so I ended up having to do each one individually. As of right now, I have three separate documents for each of my chosen states (which are, in case I didn’t tell you, Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia).

The Maryland document is in perfect working condition. Virginia and Delware still have some formatting issues I need to take care of pretty soon–just things like dashes in place of numbers for non-applicable data. I’m not entirely sure if those can be there or not. Also, my data include city data which I’m not sure is needed, so I may have to delete that before I fully work with it in even more detail. I just need to ask my professor.

That’s truly all there was to lab three. A nice change of pace from lab two. Off to Lab 4! (I actually already have about half of it done, but don’t think I’m ahead of schedule! It was due the 23rd………I’m so stupid……..)

Okay, so making the website at first proved to be pretty troublesome. I think the whole class had many problems and speed bumps to overcome while making each of his or her websites. For me, personally, I had quite a few problems….

First, there was the issue of just getting everything to work. It took a very long time to first get familiar with even the most basic HTML and. Then I had to get used to using WS FTP uploading, changing HTML in Notepad (who would have thought you could use Notepad to change website material?), as well as Kompozer, Gimp, and various other open-source programs. It was all pretty overwhelming, to be honest. This lead me to the issue of my website building problems…

Building my website using Kompozer was probably a bigger issue for me than everyone else in the class. I felt like I was expected to do some pretty huge things with the website and I didn’t have any idea how to start seriously modifying the template we were given. I didn’t just want to change the text and the information and call it a day. I wanted to make the website perfect. My aspirations were far too high. So, on the day before it was due, I went to a computer lab in McGilvrey Hall to sit down and work on it…..and that’s where I started feeling hopeless. My professor had already left for the day after I foolishly said I didn’t need any help when she asked before she left. To be fair though, I hadn’t really done more than 10 minutes of work when I was asked and just figured that I wouldn’t hit as many road blocks as I did. After doing some slight modifying and trying to do my huge “vision” for the site and failing, I decided to give up and maybe try to finish it the next day before it was actually due.

Well, as my professor can tell you, that didn’t work out so well. I woke up with an awful migraine that day and had already missed half of my first class. So much for getting it done before class started. I was very discouraged and just sort of….gave up and just tried to get rid of my headache. I ended up missing the presentation which was a big no-no, and further ended up getting behind in a lot of classes.

I ended up finishing the website in the end, albeit late, and even though it isn’t exactly what I wanted it to be, I’m actually pretty proud of it. I still have big plans for the website. I want to make it something more than just my Advanced Cartography website. In the future, perhaps once the class is over, I would like to try to make it into an online portfolio with more than just my work from cart, but from my entire geography career at Kent State. That’s the plan at least. We’ll see if it actually comes to fruition….