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

Online Data, Project Work and Presentation Tips

April 22, 2020, Joseph Ferreira

Administrative

  • Lab #7: Part 2 due today, April 22
  • Project work:
    • See feedback on Stellar
    • Talk to us today via breakouts  
      • Have you obtained and explored your key datasets?
    • Project presentations on Monday, May 11, TWO WEEKS FROM NEXT MONDAY
  • Utilize office/lab hours Thursday (10:30-noon) and Friday (12:30-2:00), zoom links on Stellar


Today

  • Project presentation tips (using Cherrie Abbanat's slides)
  • Progress on projects (via one-on-one breakouts)

Project Presentation Tips

Project Scope

  • Project ideas: 
    • Most of you are reasonably settled on a project topic
    • What about project scope and expectations
      • In-lab tests are an (abbreviated) example of a possible project
      • For example: What geographic and socio-economic characteristics explain county-level differences in results; how has this changed over a few elections
  • In general
    • Project has a broad topic but focuses on a piece with a spatial component that can contribute to a broader inquiry (beyond scope of class)
    • Project involves finding new datasets and/or learning some new tools and applying them to open-ended inquiry of student's choosing
    • Project could provide context and first step in a longer study you anticipate in future semesters

File organization and performance issues for project work

  • If you have shapefiles and data > ~20 MB, set LOCAL locations in the environment for workspace and (especially) scratch space
  • Redundancy can be good!
    • Read-only copy of original datasets
    • Local working copies
      • proj20_working folder that you move from network to C:\temp and back
      • Many MXDs: 11.188_proj_v1.mxd, _v2, _v3, ...
      • Use Personal Geodatabase (MS-Access with extra tables): 11.188_proj_working.mdb to store datasets
        • Create it via ArcCatalog as a personal geodatabase so it has geospatial tables that ESRI wants before you can save new data into it
    • Use multiple windows (especially on machines with big screens)
      • Use Data Frames with different joins, coordinates, etc.
      • Open multiple ArcMap sessions along with Access and Excel and a text editor
        • Just keep the file versions straight and remember only one app can have write access to a dataset or map document
        • And you may need to close files if locked by another application
  • Refresh issues in ArcMap
    • Sometimes, removing a table and then editing it (outside of ArcMap) and adding the new version of it will add the old version (from cache)
      • Save ArcMap document, exit ArcMap, and restart - then add table
      • This happens if you edit the table outside ArcMap and do not change the name
      • Alternatively, give the edited table a new name before adding to ArcMap
    • When ArcMap is slow to redraw maps
      • If the mapped layer has joins to large tables (without indices), then redraw will be slow
      • You can always export the joined layer as a new shapefile and add it back for much faster performance
      • You can copy the symbology from one layer onto another layer
    • Saving and restarting ArcMap
      • After an hour or so of an active ArcMap session, ArcMap may get internally confused and fail to do a join or ArcToolbox operation
      • To fix, save ArcMap document (with new _v2... number), close ArcMap, and then restart


Last modified 1 April 2020 [jf]
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