What Fun!

This week there were three maps created using some similar elements and I really enjoyed creating them.  All of them had to do with Mexico in some way elevation, population density, or urban areas.  I think that my favorite was the elevation map because that is more along the lines of the data that I one day hope to work in scientific data so I really did like this one.  Below are my map examples:

Mexico State Population Size

Urban Areas of Central Mexico

Surface Elevation in Meters of Mexico

One of the neat things about the Urban Area of Central Mexico map is that my cousins lived in Guadalajara for a few years and I was able to go visit them, it was a very neat experience.  Also, my sister did a study abroad in Puebla for a semester.  Previously I wasn't sure in Mexico where it was in relation to other cities but I have a better idea now!  Some of the challenges that I faced while completing this lab is that I was very nit picky about the display of things and worked very hard on the presentation of elements in these maps.  I will say that from my previous GIS classes, I am missing Adobe Illustrator because of the ease of manipulating things like text and colors.  I sure do hope that we get into that program in the class.

Week 2, Warming Up

This weeks lab was to create a map allowing the viewer to locate the UWF campus in reference to a map of Florida and Escambia County.

This lab was a good introduction to some more complex features of ArcMap such as clipping and working with multiple dataframes.  I belive this will come in handy later on this semester.  It was sometimes frustrating when you wre trying to work with a feature only to realize that you were working in the wrong data set.  Overall I belive that this lab was very helpful because I finally figured out how to change cursor modes after a bit of frustration.  I belive that this is one of the cleaner map layouts that I have produced during my time working with GIS data.

I just couldn't stay away

Here I am back again at this GIS thing.  This weeks lab was fairly straight forward because I have worked with ArcGIS before so it made the orientation easier.  I did have trouble following the directions for the process summary through because they were not very straight forward.  This map is a basic map of the worlds population in 2007 with the cities populated.

I'm looking forward to getting back into doing some more GIS and hoping that this certificate may afford me some opportunites in the future that I may not have had previously.