GIS 1 Lab 2

Lab 2

 

 

 

     The purpose of this lab was learning how to download data off the internet and use it in Arcmap to create a map. The data I used was from the US census bureau, which can be downloaded from the census.gov website.

 

     The data I downloaded was from the 2010 census, it contained population data of each county in Wisconsin.  I also downloaded a shapefile of the Wisconsin counties.

 

The Wisconsin shapefile on the US Census website ready for downloading.

  

 

 

     Next I added the shapefile to a blank map in Arcmap. Examining its attribute table yielded no useful info, so I needed to join it to the attribute table I also downloaded from the census site. 

 

      Putting the two tables side by side, I can see that they both have 72 records, and share a similar field, GEO#id. I shall join the two tables based on this field. This join is one to one cardinality, each record in the source table matches a record in the destination table.

 

      

    The tables have now been successfully joined, and population data is represented by the D001 field at the end of the table.

     The next task is to map the newly joined data, as well as download a different set of data and map that as well.  I chose Hispanic and Latino in origin, and downloaded the data for all of the Wisconsin counties. Like the population data, these two tables can be joined by the field GEO#id.  Unlike the population data, which contained only one field, the Hispanic data set has many. 

 

 

     To figure out which field to map, I looked in the excel file that came from the data. Field HD02_S30 is labeled Percent Hispanic or Latino- Total Population- Hispanic or Latino.  This seems promising. Plugging this field into graduated colors gives us a percent map by counties.  Success! All that remains now is to finish making our data into proper maps.      

 

                                     

                                 

 

 

GIS 1 Lab 1

2/11/2014

GIS 1 Lab # 1.


     The purpose of this first lab was to understand common projections.  We also learned how to define projections for features that did not have one set, and how to make very simple maps of our finished projections.

We began by making 5 different projections on the same two shapefiles, one was all the world's countries, and the other was a geographical grid. 

 

Loximuthal

                                                                         

Geographic

 



Mercator

 Sinusoidal

Equidistant Conic

 

 

 

     Next, we projected a shapefile of the United States onto a data frame with a different projection.  We learned about "on-the-fly" projection as we also added a Massachusetts roads shapefile.  We defined the projection for both of these, setting them to NAD83 Mercator Azimuth.  Once we finished that, they lined up much more smoothly.

 

 

     

 

 

 

 

 

We also projected the UTM 16N onto Wisconsin, creating a very accurate map of the state's outline.

 

We next added all of the maps together on one page, so they could easily be compared to one another.

I used Adobe Illustrator for this, I like the range of creativity and easiness of the program compared to trying to compose an image in ArcMap. I added a simple compass to a few of the maps where I thought it was appropriate.

Lastly, we combined everything we learned in the lab to create a final map of Eau Claire county in Wisconsin and its surrounding counties.  The counties shapefile came without any projection.  I gave it NAD 83 and then projected it, along with a local Rivers shapefile, onto a Wisconsin Transverse Mercator State plane.  The final result looked good, So I added a few more details to make it an official map. 

Again I used Illustrator.  I really like that you can export a map directly from ArcMap as an Illustrator file.  I'm looking forward to learning how to use other features and make even better maps between the two programs.