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Making Progress with ArcGIS Pro

Hi again!

Just thought I’d give a quick update on how my GIS training has been going. It’s getting towards the end of the Fall semester here, and I’ve been busy writing papers and grading essays, but there’s still been time to squeeze in a GIS tutorial here and there. ESRI’s ArcGIS Pro website has a number of tutorials available to teach users the basics of this new software. Since I already have the program downloaded onto my laptop, I am able to do these practice runs from anywhere, which is super handy. I go to this website here:

http://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/get-started/pro-quickstart-tutorials.htm 

There are a number of different tutorials to choose from. So far, I’ve learned how to navigate maps, add data to a project, import an ArcMap document, convert a map to a scene, and symbolize layers. 

This was a fun one. “Adding Data to a Project” allowed me to visualize how flooding might affect the city of Wellington, New Zealand, based on its current topography:

I don’t know how long each of these are supposed to take… but one will usually take me about 45 minutes to complete. Using this software is like learning a new language… it’s not similar to anything I’ve ever had to do before. I have to click on every single tab, pane, and layer to see what it does, and I have to read about every single function that ArcGIS Pro is able to perform. Historians are trained to be quick readers. When you have to read about a book a week per class, you learn to find those main arguments, and skim over the less pertinent information. (Otherwise you’ll never get anything else done!) Learning GIS is a completely different process. There is no big picture approach to understanding the program… it’s a step-by-step learning process and there is no “skimming” allowed. I am hoping that eventually the process becomes quicker and easier, since right now I look like my 87 year old grandfather when he tries to type an email.

Sharon from Brock’s MDGL just sent over a particularly interesting tutorial entitled “Quantitative mapping for ArcGIS Pro” which is a little more in line with the type of work that I will be doing in the upcoming months. This tutorial explains how to use statistical data, in this case local census data, to map the housing and education profiles of the population of St. Catharines. I will be working with similar types of quantitative data, so this one looks to be very useful.

In addition to tutorials, I’ve been doing a lot of reading over the past few months in order to get a better idea of how historical GIS can expand the potential of analysis for this project. Here’s just a few books and articles that I’ve read so far:

Bonnell, Jennifer and Marcel Fortin, eds. Historical GIS Research in Canada. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2014.

Gregory, Ian and Alistair Geddes. Toward Spatial Humanities: Historical GIS and Spatial History. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2014.

Heasley, Lynne. “Shifting Boundaries on a Wisconsin Landscape: Can GIS Help Historians Tell a Complicated Story?” Human Ecology 31, no. 2 (2003): 183–213.

Knowles, A.K., and A. Hiller. Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS are Changing Historical Scholarship. Redlands, California: ESRI Press, 2008.

Novak, Mathew J., and Jason A. Gilliland. “Trading Places: A Historical Geography of Retailing in London, Canada.” Social Science History 35, no. 4 (2011): 543–7

Wood, Justin. “‘How Green Is My Valley?’ Desktop Geographic Information Systems as a Community-Based Participatory Mapping Tool.” Area 37, no. 2 (2005): 159–70

Digital historians argue that historical GIS was once a creative appendage to research, but it is now directly driving analyses of the past! (Gregory & Geddes, 2014) The investigative capabilities of GIS detect patterns that historical narratives alone cannot, providing a variety of angles for analyzing Niagara’s merchandising networks.

That’s it for now. Back to grading…

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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!