Spring 2017 UVa Library GIS Workshop Series
All sessions are one hour and assume participants have no previous experience using GIS. Sessions will be hands-on with step-by-step tutorials and expert assistance. All sessions will be taught on Wednesdays from 2PM to 3PM in the Alderman Electronic Classroom, ALD 421 (adjacent to the Scholars’ Lab) and are free and open to the UVa and larger Charlottesville community. No registration, just show up!
February 1st - Making Your First Map with ArcGIS
Here’s your chance to get started with geographic information systems software in a friendly, jargon-free environment. This workshop introduces the skills you need to make your own maps. Along the way you’ll get a taste of Earth’s most popular GIS software (ArcGIS) and a gentle introduction to cartography. You’ll leave with your own cartographic masterpieces and tips for learning more in your pursuit of mappiness at UVa.
February 8th - Georeferencing a Map - Putting Old maps and Aerial Photos on Your Map
Would you like to see historic map overlaid on modern aerial photography? Do you need to extract features of a map for use in GIS? Georeferencing is the first step. We will show you how to take a scan of a paper map and align in it in ArcGIS.
February 15th - Getting Your Data on a Map
Do you have a list of Lat/Lon coordinates or addresses you would like to see on a map? We will show you how to do just that. Through ArcGIS’s Add XY data tool and Geocoding (address matching), it is easy to take your tabular lists and generate points on a map.
February 22nd - Points on Your Map: Street Addresses and More Spatial Things
Do you have a list of street addresses crying out to be mapped? Have a list of zip codes or census tracts you wish to associate with other data? We’ll start with addresses and other things spatial and end with points on a map, ready for visualization and analysis.
March 1st - Taking Control of Your Spatial Data: Editing in ArcGIS
Until we perfect that magic “extract all those lines from this paper map” button we’re stuck using editor tools to get that job done. If you’re lucky, someone else has done the work to create your points, lines, and polygons but maybe they need your magic touch to make them better. This session shows you how to create and modify vector features in ArcMap, the world’s most popular geographic information systems software. We’ll explore tools to create new points, lines, and polygons and to edit existing datasets. At version 10, ArcMap’s editor was revamped introducing new templates, but we’ll keep calm and carry on.
March 15th - Easy Demographics
Need to make a quick demographic map or religious adherence? This workshop will show you how easily navigate Social Explorer. This powerful online application makes it easy to create maps with contemporary and historic census data and religious information.
March 22nd Census Data
Would you like to map the poverty in Philadelphia around the turn of the 20th Century? How about a racial breakdown by state in the 1860s? This workshop will focus on how to download historic census boundary and tabular data to make historic demographic maps.
March 29th - Introduction to ArcGIS Online
With ArcGIS Online, you can use and create maps and scenes, access ready-to-use maps, layers and analytics, publish data as web layers, collaborate and share, access maps from any device, make maps with your Microsoft Excel data, customize the ArcGIS Online website, and view status reports. You can also use ArcGIS Online as a platform to build custom location-based apps.