Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Department of Urban Studies
and Planning
11.520: A Workshop on Geographic Information
Systems
11.188: Urban Planning and Social Science
Laboratory
In-Lab Notes for Lab 6 (Raster Analysis)
Preliminary Project Proposal:
All undergrads in 11.188 and grad students continuing with 11.520,
need to submit a very preliminary project proposal by Wednesday- just a
topic, tentative title, and spatial exploration possibilities.
If you have not yet submitted the proposal, think about your topic
today and submit your preliminary thoughts by Wednesday!
General comments on projects:
We have included website links in various lecture notes that may be useful in finding data and ideas for projects.
Comparing census data at tract or block group geographies over
several decades can be tricky since boundaries change. Several
third-party and online resources help by allocating earlier census
data to 2000 or 2010 geographies.
MIT Libraries (especially the GIS folks at Rotch Library, https://libguides.mit.edu/gis)
have a number of resources that can help you find datasets and access
census data. For more information about census data, see: http://libguides.mit.edu/census/
See the section on 'Normalized data' for information about
multi-decade census data.
MIT has a university license for access to Social Explorer (http://www.socialexplorer.com/) which
provides a number of tools for accessing census data.
ArcGIS Help: 'Spatial Analyst' - Start with the 'Overview'
The exercise is more or less self-explanatory.
I'll demonstrate the first few steps of the raster manipulation
tools - viz., setting up 100m gridcells for Cambridge and using
these to convert the sales89 and cambbgrp layers to rasters.
Spatial Analyst: Setting up the grid cells and properties
explore 'options' values
after creating grid, zoom in to border and check edges
examine attribute table
After first IDW (inverse distance weighting)
compare with/without mask
note that attribute table is not visible for floating point grid
values
note display does additional smoothing with contour-like thematic
map