Week 10: Geocoding and Spring Break

This lab was easy to follow and to complete. I had one small issue with the city type. I was able to convert the labels to annotations so I could move them. However, in the upper left corner of the map there were some labels that went with cities that are off the map. I could not figure out how to delete them, so I made them disappear by making them the same color as the county. I wonder what is the best way to handle this? I got lucky that the labels did not cross more than one color.

Week 9: Buffers

Question answers:

1. I used the Intersect tool. It accomplished the same thing as using the union tool and selecting the appropriate records, but with fewer steps.

2. I used the erase tool because it excluded the conservation areas from the possible sites.

3. There were 79 features. The Largest was 7,765,034.5 square meters and the smallest was 748.1 square meters.

Week 7: Editing Data

This was easier than I expected. The ESRI module took a lot longer than I expected, so I started this very late. The exercises in the module were very helpful.

This was so much easier than the previous lab. I think, mostly because there was only one main task. Anyway, I did not have too much trouble getting the raster maps to come close to matching the vector maps. There is one area on the left where there was still some distortion, but there was not much to match to on the vector map in that area. It was kind of fun to watch the map change as points were added.

Week 5 Lab: Data Search

This was the frustrating map. As with all 3 of the maps, finding the data was easy. (An editor at work recently told me that if I can't find something, it probably does not exist.) My problem was that I had too much data. These files contained every road type and hydrography down to the level of a drainage ditch. I played with this as much as I could, even though the server was very slow. I was able to eliminate several categories, but then I had trouble simplifying the legend. I wanted one entry for all roads, one for hydrography line, and one for hydrography polygon.

This map went well until I got to the conversion of the DEM. Even with the guidance of the discussion board, I struggled with it, but eventually I succeeded by using ArcCatalog. For the DEM, I flipped the scale, so the highest elevation is the darkest. I think it looks pretty cool.


For this map, I decided to leave the "land use" categories off of the legend. I did this because there were so many that the legend would have covered the entire map. Also, there were many blank categories and I did not know how to remove them. Hopefully in the near future, I will become more adept at editing legends.

Haiti Earthquake Map

I found this USGS map through the web site of the University of Texas Perry-Castaneda Map Collection. The opening page of this site usually has links to maps of current events, so it is often the first place I go for this type of map. I also find that it is very difficult to find things on government sites, such as USGS, so the University of Texas site is especially helpful.

I chose this map because it is simple, yet provides vital information. It indicated where the earthquake was the most severe. I like that the color scheme is intuitive with red as the most severely affected area. This helps to focus any rescue and humanitarian efforts to the areas that were hardest hit.

Week 4Lab: Projections

This lab was a little more complex than the others. I felt like I still do not have the skills to design the map the way I would like. I was not able to label only the four relevant counties. I tried doing the SQL query, but was unable to format it correctly. Instead, I used color to designate each county.