Gothos

I’ve been building the library’s collection of geography, GIS, and demography books, and many of them have started arriving. I thought I’d share some of best picks with everyone. Here’s a subset of some of the GIS titles (and more are on the way!)

A to Z GIS : an illustrated dictionary of geographic information systems 2nd ed
Wade, Tasha and Sommer, Shelly
ESRI Press, 2006
Convenient print copy of ESRI’s online glossary, with nice illustrations.

Beyond mapping : meeting national needs through enhanced geographic information science
National Research Council (U.S.). Committee on Beyond Mapping
National Academies Press, 2006
A concise overview of GIS: where it’s been, where it is, where it needs to go, and why.

Elevation data for floodplain mapping
National Research Council (U.S.). Committee on Floodplain Mapping Technologies
National Academies Press, 2007.
The specific topic is quite salient, but this book also serves as great intro to rasters and remote sensing in general.

Geographic information systems demystified
Galati, Stephen R
Artech House, 2006.
A non-ESRI overview of GIS. It’s been checked out since it arrived, so it must be good!

Georeferencing : the geographic associations of information
Hill, Linda L.
MIT Press, 2006.
This is what I’m reading now. It covers spatial cognition, digitization, coordinates, ontologies, gazetteers, metadata, info retrieval, and more.

Getting to know ArcGIS desktop : basics of ArcView, ArcEditor, and ArcInfo 2nd ed., updated for ArcGIS 9.
Ormsby, Tim, et. al.
ESRI Press, 2004
At this point, the old stand-by introduction to ArcGIS

Making maps : a visual guide to map design for GIS
Krygier, John and Wood, Denis
Guilford Press, 2005
Easy to read and cleverly organized overview of cartographic conventions and design for GIS

Statistical methods for geography : a student guide 2nd ed.
Rogerson, Peter A.
Sage Publications, 2006.
Nice overview of this topic with many examples.

I’m in Boston at the Association of American Geographers (AAG) annual conference this week, and attended a great series that explored what the Census Bureau is currently up to. Here are some hi-lites:

The Bureau is now providing the TIGER line files in shapefile format! Before, it was only possible to get generalized cartographic boundary files directly from the bureau in shapefile format. Now, you can get the boundaries in their original detail from a public domain source. Includes 2000 census geography plus some updates for 2007 for states, counties, metros, places, zips, districts, pumas, and more. Currently, it does not include tracts, block groups, or blocks.

The 2008 release of the American Community Survey (ACS) will include two datasets. There will be the annual numbers for geographies that have over 65,000 people, and for the first time there will be three year averages for geographies that have over 20,000 people. In each succeeding year, this average will be recalculated by adding in the most recent year and dropping the oldest one. Data for geographies with less than 20,000 people will become available in 2011 and will be based on five year averages. The good news is that, from that point forward, data will be available for all areas every single year. The bad news is that the long form (the one in six sample of households taken in the decennial census) is being discontinued and will not be conducted in 2010. Census 2010 will consist solely of the short form questions (the 100% count that covers the basic demographic variables). The ACS will serve as the replacement to the long form, but in most cases the data will not be suitable for making historical comparisons (i.e. comparing 2010 to 2000).

Bureau reps gave an overview of their Population Estimates program. Unlike the ACS which is survey based, estimates are calculated using a cohort component analysis that accounts for births, deaths, and migration each year. Estimates are calculated nationally and at the county level. The county numbers are used to create estimates for each state, which are then adjusted to fit national numbers. Data is available for total population, race, age (broken down by gender for each year at the national level and for five year groups below that) and housing units. Some data is also available for metropolitan areas (which are county based) and county subdivisions (for total population only).

The Bureau gave an overview of Dataferret, which is a tool for data power users. It is available in two versions, as download-able software or as a browser-based JAVA applet, and allows users to gather and process data from several different government sources (unlike the Amerivan Factfinder, which focuses solely on downloading census data).

Finally, things are ramping up for the 2010 Decennial Census. The bureau is updating its master address files and has almost finished recalibrating the TIGER files for each county, so that boundaries are precise within a maximum limit of 70 meters.

I’ve posted the tutorials from the workshop I gave the other day for the NYCRDC. I’ve created a Resources page to hold resources hosted on this site - you can find them there, along with the datasets.

Overall I think it went rather well, but it was way too much material for a three hour workshop! We covered the intro slides, and Part I (Intro to GIS and ArcMap). I did an abridged version of Parts II (Intro to Layout View) and III (finding and downloading data, ArcCatalog, preprocessing in Excel) rather than doing all of II and none of III. The third part covers a lot that the standard ArcGIS texts gloss over (or leave out all together), so I really wanted to cover some of that material. But I couldn’t omit any of the basics in the first two parts, because you really need to know them before you can delve further (and understand why you’re delving). Ahhh, the steep learning curve of GIS!