Each student will also complete a series of 11 lab exercises in this course. These assignments will be provided in class as handouts, and all will highlight important topics and give you practice at working with and using ArcView. The exercises themselves will draw from a variety of materials, including maps and data tables. We will begin (if not complete) these exercises in our Wednesday class sessions. Your 10 highest lab scores will comprise your Lab Exercise grade.
| Lab 1: | Introduction to ArcView | Lab 7: | Cholera in Perú | |
| Lab 2: | Map Projections | Lab 8: | Plotting Earthquake Occurrence | |
| Lab 3: | Map Types | Lab 9: | Address Geocoding | |
| Lab 4: | U.S. Demographic Mapping | Lab 10: | South Carolina Bar-B-Que | |
| Lab 5: | Managing Grizzlies and Habitat Loss | Lab 11: | Working with Grids | |
| Lab 6: | West African Climate Data |
As a spatial tool, GIS is extremely powerful. With it, an analyst is capable of assembling a wide array of data, sorting and processing that data into useful information, and using that information to answer timely questions. Your final assignment for the semester will be to use GIS in this manner to answer a seemingly simple question: Is Northwest Indiana urban or rural? For the purpose of this assignment, consider Northwest Indiana to consist of Lake, Porter, and LaPorte counties.
To complete this assignment, you and your teammates will need to gather appropriate data sources for use in ArcView and find some way to analyze those data. You will probably also need to define the terms "urban" and "rural." You may craft these definitions yourselves or research the definitions various experts have devised . . . or both. In the end, you will need to identify urban areas and rural areas based on multiple criteria. You will then need to analyze Northwest Indiana through a series of map overlays, identifying which areas are urban and rural. You can then decide whether the region as a whole is urban or rural. And you may not waffle on this answer. You much choose one condition-urban or rural.
You will also need to present your findings as a persuasive argument to the class at the end of the semester. Your job will be to convince the class that your group's answer to this question is the correct one. To do this, you will need to explain your definitions, criteria, and research steps. You should also present a map sequence of your findings using exported graphics from ArcView in a Powerpoint presentation. Your presentation should last between 15 and 20 minutes.
You must also summarize your results in a paper, which should be 7-10 pages in length. It should be doubled-spaced and printed using a laser printer (I will not accept low quality print). Appropriate figures and references should be included in the final product. Any outside sources should be referenced properly.
By design, this assignment contains minimal instructions, and most of the responsibility for determining what to do falls on you and your teammates. However, since this is an introductory course and we won't cover a couple of the techniques you'll probably need to use for a couple of weeks, here are some suggestions for getting started.
First, you will need to build a new project and populate your views with some basic themes and a combination of demographic and land use data. To conduct your demographic analysis, you will need data at a finer level of aggregation than the county level. The Census Bureau organizes and collects data at the census tract, block group, and block level-each offering less and less aggregation. You should review these Census Bureau terms by visiting the Glossary of Geographic Terms link near the bottom of the main TIGER page on the Census Bureau web site (www.census.gov). You should probably also trim your data to the three counties under consideration here and union the shapefiles together.
Once you have your data, you should proceed to make a series of maps (most likely choropleth and area class maps). Your maps should show the spatial patterns of the variables or traits you feel best represent urban/rural contrasts. To identify these traits, you should consider what characteristics define urban/rural areas and then identify the Census Bureau statistics that best represent those characteristics. Ideally, you should have 3-6 traits to analyze.
To determine which areas meet all 3-6 criteria, you will need to convert your map coverages to grids and then overlay the grids. Chapter 11 in your book provides an overview of grid use (see p. 143, especially, for a step-by-step sequence).
We'll have time late in the semester to practice working with grids, so you can save these steps until then. You should, however, have worked out all your definitions, collected and imported all your data, decided on your data indicators/variables, and produced your set of choropleth and area class map sequence by then. That way, you'll have only the very last steps to complete after you learn about working with grids.