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

Test and Project Feedback

 

November 19, 2008, Joseph Ferreira

Administrative

  • Labs 4 and 5 handed back today, comments online this week
  • Homework #3 Part 2 (model builder) due next Monday, Nov. 24, to Stellar
  • No new lab exercises or homework - focus on individual project work
  • General test and project feedback today, individual results and feedback by end of week

 

Test Feedback

  • Answers are now online as a link in the test folder
  • Topics for review
    • Data manipulation in ArcMap vs. Access - tradeoffs
      • Easy to do sorting and summarizing either way
      • Write access, DBF limits, and file proliferation issues in ArcMap
      • Table transfer and query skill issues in MS-Access
    • File organization for project work
      • C:\usertemp is local, I:\ is not
      • Setting locations in the environment: workspace and scratch space
      • Redundancy can be good!
        • Read-only copy of originals (test08data)
        • Local working copies
          • Test08_working folder
          • Many MXDs: 11.520_test08_working1.mxd, 2, 3, ...
          • Use Access: 11.520_test08_working.mdb
          • Use Data Frames with different joins, coordinates, etc.
    • Coordinate system issues
      • Lat/lon vs. national albers vs. north carolina state plane
      • Data Frame vs. on-disk vs. dialog box settings
      • Making use of Data Frames
      • Grid issues in spatial analyst
    • Spatial analysis and raster manipulation
      • Color/pattern/transparency choices for visualization
      • Normalization issues
        • votes compared to what (McCain vs. Obama, Counts vs. Percents, ...)
      • Coordinate system for the grid
      • Mask for restricting proximity operations
    • Further analyses
      • Let's look further into delta_votes and distance-to-MSA
      • Delta_votes percentage changes
      • Use of zonal stats tools to get average distance of counties to MSAs


Last modified 19 November 2008 [jf]
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