My First GIS Tutorial

Hello again!

Just thought I’d give you a quick overview of the ArcGIS Pro workshop that I attended yesterday afternoon. It was my first experience with the new software, and I think it went pretty well!

Wednesday, Nov 14th was global GIS day. According to its website, “GIS Day provides an international forum for users of geographic information systems (GIS) technology to demonstrate real-world applications that are making a difference in our society.” Of course, Brock University’s Map, Data & GIS Library participated in this event, offering up some free food, games & prizes, a chance to watch some Esri scholarship contest presentations, and a helpful ArcGIS workshop.

The workshop was lead by the library’s Geospatial Data Cooridnator Sharon Janzen, who led us through a tutorial that aimed to give users a basic idea of what ArcGIS is capable of doing. My initial thoughts are that this is something that I can probably get the hang of… but there is a lot to learn. The software is fairly intuitive, but you really need to know what is available in order to fully maximize the potential of its features. The user interface is similar to what you’d see in Microsoft Word or Excel since it is a ribbon-based application, providing the familiar tabs and tools along the top of the screen. We went through one of the tutorials available on Brock’s MDGL website, and were given the task of choosing a new location for a Starbucks in St. Catharines based on variables like the current locations of coffee shops in the city, and the median average income of each community. You can have a look at the tutorial here.

In order to do this, we were taught the basics of inserting databases, geocoding, adding new data from ArcGIS Online, adjusting symbology, and creating heat maps. One hour later, we each had a finished project that looked something like this:

During the tutorial, I was constantly trying to figure out how these features can apply to my project. The creation of a database with statistics concerning 18th and 19th century merchant activity is going to be a time consuming process, but slightly easier now that I’ve seen examples of data sets that were used in this tutorial. In addition, I will be able to play around with georeferenced historical maps of Niagara that already exist, thanks to the MDGL. Things are slowly beginning to make more sense. I still have a long way to go, but I’m excited about how this software is going to help present my historical information.

Thanks Sharon!