Lab 1 - Tour of Arcmap

Lab 1 - Due in class for Week 2

The UCSB Geography 176b class has a nice, brief tour of Arcmap as their first exercise. With their permission, I am assigning this as our first lab as well. Please complete Lab 1 - Intro to ArcGIS from the Geog176b lab page and turn it in at the beginning of class next week.

Notes of about lab

1. The beginning the lab concerns printing and computer use in the geography lab. These are not relevant to our class, so scroll down to "Copying Data", below these initial passages.
2. There are questions in orange boxes on the tutorial. Please consider the questions but you do not have to answer the questions in your lab.
3. The assignment involves two maps, described in green box at the bottom of the webpage.

Please see the syllabus for reading assignments for next week.

Lab 2 - Acquire new data for your study area

This lab follows on the Week 5 class exercises that we completed during class.

Lab 2 - Data acquisition

1. Generate a polygon bounding your study area in Lat/Long coordiates, WGS1984 datum.

2. Acquire one layer of each type of data listed above for your study region (GE imagery, Topography, and landsat data) and import these data into Arcmap.

3. Show the bounding box over each image in Arcmap with the Lat/Long coordinates showing in the margins (hint... Add Grid under Properties). A north arrow and scale would also be useful. Try to use a round number for the scale (i.e., 1:10,000 or 1:100,000) and put that text on the side of the map with Text Scale command in Arcmap.

4. Generate a PDF showing each view and save it on your USB key. These can be big files so don't email these to me, we'll copy them off.

5. Important: get the Metadata from each source as you download it.

Find out:

• The type of imagery (e.g., Landsat TM+, ASTER)
• when the image was acquired (date/time), is this the dry season or the wet season?
• reference system (lat long or path/row)
• Try to include Metadata text in abbreviated form on the margins of the map next to the scale bar and such.
  
• With Landsat imagery (don't call them 'photographs', by the way) people often report the Band Order with respect to Red, Green, Blue (RGB) display. So if Red = Band 3, Green = Band 2, Blue = Band 1 then you're showing RGB as 321.

If you want to see an example of a project I did with ASTER imagery where I report the metadata, see this webpage: Seasonality in the Colca Valley. You don't have to include that much detail for this assignment, just a few short lines.

6. Hand these in in class on the fourth week. 

 

 

Midterm Assignment: Proposal

Midterm assignment: Proposal for research

The midterm consists of a 5-10 page (double spaced) proposal for an anthropological research project involving GIS data management and analysis.

A. Theoretical goals of the project

• why use GIS (based on what you've learned so far).
• what are the strengths and the drawbacks to organizing your research with GIS?
• how do you anticipate presenting the data (paper, web, tables, summaries?)
• how would your digital research approach interface with existing data acquired using traditional methods? Is it compatible?

B. Implementation

• data acquisition and processing issues
• data organization and table structure.
  
• analysis goals. Pick two or three phenomena of interest. How do GIS based analysis methods fit / not fit with these goals?

C. Results

• dissemination of results
• web distribution?
• security / privacy issues?
• storage of data.

Bibliography using anthropological citation conventions.

Hand in Midterm before class on 6^th week.

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Lab 3 - Point pattern analysis

This lab follows on the Week 6: Point dispersal analysis class exercises.

LAB 3 - Point patterns and topography

The Lab 3 homework, due next Monday Nov 13 in class, is an assignment where you take the results of one of these point dispersal analyses and display them on top of a nice looking topographic map. You can make the map coverage either of the Callalli area or of your research area.

You learned in Week 5, part IV how to make shaded-relief contour maps, and in Week 6, Part II we mapped point concentrations.

So you can combine these into a large-scale map (that is, zoomed in on one site at maybe 1:4000 scale) showing point variability using the Moran's I Index and the Cluster rendering. Pick a good site with interesting variability to zoom in on. You may use one of the values we chose in Lab 6, or pick another value such as Ceramic Style, Vessel Form, or something from the Lithics category. consider labeling the Cluster points by the value of interest. For example, in the class exercise you could have labeled the Hot/Cold cluster values with the Period_Gen value and it would have been clear which clusters we are referring to.

If you do this lab assignment with data from your own research area instead, you'll need to have the appropriate point data for your area. That would mean that you need DEM topographic data and some features distributed into point layers. You also need variability in the attributes, and you can make up some values for this assignment if necessary.

Please include a sentence about the statistical strength of what you're mapping from the Moran's I index.

For cartographic features, below is an example of a Callalli map on a different theme from my dissertation. Try to reproduce some of the cartographic features in your map, such as the title and scale bars.

Print the map to PDF and email it to me at

ntripcevich@gmail.com

You can print it to paper if you wish, but I'd be interested in seeing the color version.

Please write with any questions.

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You can get some ideas for cartographic layout from this is map from my dissertation showing diagnostic ceramics.

Click map for a legible PDF version

Lab 4 - Cost surface

Lab 4 assignment - Cost surface

The Lab 4 exercise follows on the Week 9 in class exercise. The assignment is to perform an anisotropic cost-surface calculation and least cost paths calculation on your own research data. Choose one or two sites as the source areas, and then choose four destinations and generate polylines of equal travel time (isochrones). Then create Least cost paths between these areas.

Choose units that are appropriate to your study region. On a small area, create isochrones that are 10 min or 15 min apart. For bigger regions, consider using hours, or even days (8 hour days), for travel estimates.

You shouldn't need color to display these results because graphically it is pretty simple. Therfore, work with the greyscale color palette. Format the resulting map onto an 8.5 by 11 in greyscale on the laserprinter and hand in the print out before class next week. Alternately you may email the PDF.

If you do not have appropriate data, just invent some points by placing Points into a new Shapefile on features that you see in your GoogleEarth image.

If you have ASTER DEM data (30m) use that data. If not, use SRTM data. You must be in UTM (metric) space to perform these calculations. SRTM data is probably in decimal degrees (these are angular, not areal, units), so they must be transformed.

Lab 4 is due at the start of class next week.

Final Assignment: Poster

Final assignment: Poster presentation

For the final assignment class members will prepare a conference-quality poster showing their study area and two complementary analyses that they have conducted using spatial data. The focus of the poster is on showing the utility of these analyses, so the organization of the poster and presentation of data should reflect meaningful information gained from the analyses that you conducted.

A. Study area map

To orient the viewer and introduce the study area, the poster should include a relatively large format map of the study area (covering approximately 25% of the poster area) developed using the cartographic techniques acquired in this class. Please include an inset showing the location of this detail map in the context of the national boundaries. Also show your study area and the thematic information that reflects your research proposal in the Midterm.

B. Two Analyses

The point of this poster is to demonstrate analytical methods that you've developed in the context of GIS. You might use a raster-based approach for one and vector-based approach for the other, or combine them in some way. Many of these methods are complementary:

• predicting site locations, testing the results with with appropriate random sampling.
• evaluating size and location of archaeological sites through time against environmental or socio-political variables (other sites).
• evaluating agriculturally productive lands from satellite imagery and determining if streams are adjacentto river drainages.
• we will discuss other analyses in class. Consider the goals of your research in selecting analyses.

Please include 100 to 300 words of text (in a 18 point font minimally) explaining the analyses and the results of your findings.

You might have 2 or 4 small maps showing some progression or the separate layers that contribute to the analysis.

C. Poster Format

We will use the plotter in the GIS room in the lab. The posters should be D sized plots (24 x 36").

Remember that the materials are quite expensive. Even the blank paper costs quite a bit per roll. Thus, please don't waste materials and print a lot of drafts. Rather, we should prepare PDFs of our document drafts and look at them carefully in Acrobat. Try not to use more than one draft printout in the preparation of your final poster.

For the final we'll hang up the posters and talk about each one.

The poster is due during the scheduled final on Tues, Dec 12 at 3pm.
We will meet in HSSB 2018.