Date: April 5th, 2023
Location: State College, PA
Hi again! Still not much is happening so far, but we are getting closer with each passing day! That being said, here’s the update from these past couple of weeks.
Again, because our project is very technical, we have to do a lot of reading from textbooks. This time was no different- except for the fact that it came from a different textbook. It was still one of the Penn State offered course readings, except it was from a course called GEOG 486: Cartography and Visualization. Again, we only had to read four chapters from this book just so that everyone could be on the same page about GIS since we’ll be working with it heavily on our project. From these couple of chapters, I’d say everything was pretty familiar, but there were definitely a few new pieces of information and smaller details I didn’t know about beforehand. The first chapter was all about base maps. I have some experience with base maps because I’m currently in a GIS class. Though that chapter went into a lot more detail so I got to learn a few more things here and there that I wouldn’t have gained with just my hands-on experience.
The second chapter was about layouts and that was pretty straightforward. I actually enjoy making layouts and even though they’re pretty simple and easy to make, it’s a nice and relaxing experience for me oddly enough. Either way, all the information in this chapter felt pretty familiar and nothing was really new. The third chapter was on designing maps- specifically how to visualize your data. I don’t have much of a background in cartography and that’s not a huge focus of my current class so this chapter definitely brought in a few new details and pieces of information that were unfamiliar yet very useful. But a lot of it did feel like a good chunk of this information was familiar to me so a large portion of this part of the reading felt like a review from my current class. But I really liked the page on symbols. That has to be one of my favorite parts when making maps.
The fourth chapter was all about color and choropleth maps. I had a little bit of knowledge on this subject because of my GIS class but I absolutely learned some new things while reading this chapter. One of the things that stood out to me was actually learning about the color schemes. I heard briefly in my GIS class that color schemes are really important to maps and choosing the wrong color scheme can make your map unreadable for some people or misleading at first glance. But this chapter really puts into perspective how something as simple as “color” and “color schemes” aren’t just something to make your map look pretty. Rather, they’re something that allows for people to actually process your map and understand it.
Everything that I’ve read will definitely be useful to me while working on the project, but I know it’ll be even more useful with my studies and when I go off into the working world. I’m a geography major so I’ll pretty sure I’ll run into just about every type of map while completing my undergrad. But because I want to be a climatologist, I think I’ll be working with a bunch of physical maps that show weather and climate-related data. Though I also would like to work with/study human populations in relation to that so I feel like I will be working with a whole host of different types of maps and visualizations if the human aspect is brought in.
One of the tasks of writing this journal was to look at the ESRI industries page to see if we could find a related industry on their website. I likely could but to be honest, I didn’t bother checking because it’s always been pretty clear to me how my desired career was going to have me using GIS nonstop (unless I’m working on climate models that will later be translated into GIS) ever since I learned about it and the geography major as a whole. Even if it’s not obvious to other people or on the website (which I highly doubt), I know that GIS absolutely has a home in a climatologist’s toolbelt.
After all, climatology is all about climate models and I know those climate models will sometimes need to be outfitted to show what the changing climate will make our Earth look like and I believe that’s something that enough GIS programming and experience can easily accomplish. I know that’s not necessarily a problem but I truly believe that for my desired path, using GIS is more so a given in the process rather than a tool you would turn to while trying to solve a problem during the process.
And that brings you to the end of my update! Again, not much “exciting stuff” is happening at the moment since we’re all still grounded in State College for a few more weeks, but it’s been very helpful just having these readings and really refreshing myself with all this GIS knowledge that we’ll be using for our project. I’m feeling more and more confident with each review that I’ll have the tools I need to be successful so I’m extremely happy with that. Thank you for reading! Until next time!
-DD
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