In 2015 the Spatial Analysis Lab will instruct a one week Interterm class open to all students, faculty, staff, and Northampton community members. The course will be taught in the first week of Interterm (Jan 5th – Jan 9th) from 1-3pm each day. The structure will be somewhat informal and may end early or stretch late depending on the day.
Please Register — we may have already exceeded capacity, but if you get on the wait list there is a good chance you will still be accepted.
Schedule (tentative):
Day 1:
- Lecture: Intro to GIS – what is GIS? We all wonder this, even in the Spatial Analysis Lab where you might think we’ve got it figured out!
- Overview of the scope of the week and how it might fit into the greater context of individual projects
- Lab 1 – Siting Problem Lab: Where to Locate a Free Health Care Clinic in Northampton
Day 2:
- Lecture: GIS Data Day! – promises to be exciting
- Lab 2 pt 1: Intro to Georeferencing
- Lab 2 pt 2: Intro to Joins
- Free form mapping activity
Day 3:
- Lecture: Basics of Cartography
- Discussion: good and bad mapping techniques
- Lab 3: Explore mapping with quantitative and qualitative data
Day 4:
- Lecture: Raster v Spatial Data
- Discussion: Environmental GIS & mapping
- Lab 4: Bike-ability Analysis of 5-College Towns
Day 5:
- Odds & Ends, Map Challenge!
- Friendly competition that ties all parts together and rewards winning group with a prize!
GIS Skills acquired (hopefully):
– Getting used to the GIS interface
– Adjusting symbology
– Select by attributes
– Select by location
– Field data collection (optional with GPS data collection, TDB)
– Address mapping
– Digitizing paper maps/historic maps
– Joining table data to shapefiles
– Mapping quantitative data
– Mapping categorical data
– Creating a good map layout: multiple data frames, making a legend, elements of a finished map
– Recognizing rasters; cell size/raster attributes
– Using the toolbox
– Spatial joins