Week 6: Georeferencing Tools

The above map shows the University of West Florida campus. It was created following the instructions for the week 6 lab. This may be my favorite lab so far. It was interesting learning how to georeference the layers to make them fit. I found it interesting that when working on the south layer, when I added one more link, it moved the RMS error from 12 to 15. The map looked better after so I left it. I did not have any real issues during this lab.

Week 5: Data Search

The maps above were created using the instructions for the week 5 lab. I divided the maps into three. I thought the land cover and hydrology map had so much stuff going on, it would be best not to add anything else. The cities, roads and public lands map came out nice. I would like to have played with the font and labels a little more but the Arc Desktop was running painfully slow this weekend which left me no time for tweaking little things here and there. That brings me to the raster data set map. This map did not come out how I would have liked. With arc map and catalog running so slow, I was lucky to get the three areas on the map together. I had no problem using the DEM conversion tool, but projecting these data sets as I wanted was taking three hours each and then freezing up the desktop. I contacted the help desk but I don't know how much help that was on the weekend as I am yet to get any response. In fairness to them, I probably sent the message st 3:00 am (one of many long nights on this lab). This was a frustrating lab, but I did learn alot. I actually enjoyed learning and executing the clipping tool. That was really neat and will come in hand I'm sure. I also became very familiar with different data as I was up to my nose in it sorting out what I liked and wanted.

Week 4: Haiti Participation Post

This map of Haiti interested me. It defines the earthquake area in terms of the amount of shaking, structure damage and population effected. The map is well designed and labeled, allowing it to be easily read by the map user. I found this map at the website reliefweb.int.

Week 4: Deliverable

The above maps compare three different projection styles using four counties located in Florida. These maps were created following instructions for the week four lab exercise. I decided to put my legend skills to the test in order to display the area of each of the four counties. I thought using a legend would be easier for the user to compare the area sizes and easily locate the counties used, rather than a table below. This lab exercise was slow going the whole way through. There was no one particular step that bogged me down, but I kept having to read the exercise guide several times to understand why I was doing what I was doing. If I had to pick the hardest part for me it would be the legend. I had to reference past exercises and feel my way through.

Week 3: Deliverables 1, 2, & 3

The above map shows the Mexican population density by state. I did not run into many major issues as the directions were very detailed and clear. I found the most interesting part of making this map was creating a new shapefile just for the Mexican states.

The above map shows central Mexico's high urban population areas, as well as it's railroads, major and primary rivers, and federal roads. I found it tricky to work with the legend at first, but quickly got the hang of it once it started to click. The annotations also gave me trouble. I had a hard time working with the world countries labels. The country name would disappear on me when I tried to select the annotation button. I was able to remedy this by checking the show label box in the properties area.

The map above shows the elevation of Mexico using stretched symbology. I chose the color scheme above because I thought it conveyed the appearance of elevation better than the other color schemes. This map was pretty straight forward and I did not run into any major issues or setbacks.