Gothos

Just for fun – I stumbled on a blog post from a TV Station in California that discusses how the developers for the new L.A. Noire video game made extensive use of libraries and archives to recreate Los Angeles of 1947. They used property, city planning, and USGS maps to recreate the street grid and landscape and aerial and street-level photos to faithfully replicate everything from specific buildings to street lights and garbage cans. They also dove into newspaper archives and Raymond Chandler’s works and personal papers for dialogue and story lines. It’s a good thing that we keep libraries and archives around to organize and collect all this stuff…

How Archivists Helped Video Game Designers Recreate the City’s Dark Side for ‘L.A. Noire’

Don’t know what I’m talking about? Check out this trailer.

Copyright RockStar Games 2011

I’ve been spending a good portion of my summer working on the course that I’m going to teach this fall. The library at my college offers credit courses in Information Studies which students can take as a minor – they can choose two 3000 level courses and then a 4000 level capstone course. My course is a 3000 level special topics course which I’ve called Geographic Information: Literacy and Systems.

My situation is rather peculiar. I can’t teach this course as a pure GIS course, since it’s an information studies class and not geography or earth sciences. Beyond that, my college does not have a geography department, and earth sciences are not an individual department but are combined with other natural and physical sciences. With the exception of a regional geography class offered by the anthropology department, my college doesn’t offer geography instruction. So even if I could teach a pure GIS class, it’s unlikely that any of the students would have any foundational geographic knowledge.

I also can’t teach the course as a “library” class where I’m training people to be map or GIS librarians, because that isn’t the point of the info studies minor. The minor is meant to introduce students to the foundational principles of information – what is information, how do we search for it, organize it, what is its context in society, etc. I also could not teach the course as a basic software class, as that isn’t really appropriate for a college course. In short, I couldn’t find a model that I could follow, as what I’m doing falls outside these traditional realms.

So I decided to build the course around the concept of geographic information where I’ll cover some foundational geography,cartography, and GIS from an information science perspective that encompasses:  organization, search and retrieval, data processing, and assessment and analysis of GI. I’ve divided the class into four units that cover geographic information and fundamental geography, maps as information objects, and two units of GIS. In the first GIS unit we’ll cover the theoretical aspects and the basics of using the software with datasets that I’ll provide. In the second unit we’ll deal with the nitty gritty of actually searching for and processing freely available GIS data. In the last couple of weeks I’ll spend some time on web mapping and on geographic analysis and research.

Many of the concepts that I’ll be teaching are things that I never formally learned in a college course, such as a discussion of the kinds of administrative and statistical divisions that exist in the world, why they exist, and how data is collected for them. The second GIS unit on data processing is something that I feel is never adequately covered in GIS classes, but is essential for doing just about anything in GIS. I think this is also poignant in information studies, as it involves a discussion of the difference between data and information and how you can turn one into the other.

I’ve decided to use all open source software. Since these are undergraduate students who probably won’t be entering a geography related field, and we are a commuter campus where students have to make special trips to get to computer labs, I didn’t see any logic in using ArcGIS. With the open source software they can use it anywhere and there will be a better chance that they’ll use it after the course is over (and after they graduate). I’ve opted to go with QGIS as it covers all the bases I need. I liked gvSIG but had too many problems with the map layout – I might be able to cut my way through them, but can sophomore business and english majors? QGIS is also more thoroughly documented (in english), which is important since this is an introductory class.

I’m using Krygier and Woods Making Maps as my textbook, along with a few chapters here and there from other texts. I have looked to the pages Krygier’s created for his courses for guidance, and like the stream of consciousness style he used for writing his notes. I’ll post an annotated reading list later.

Since I’m breaking molds, I’ve also decided not to use Blackboard to organize the whole course and am using a blog and various other bits and pieces of software for creating assignments, organizing the roster, etc. If you’re interested you can follow along on my course blog – (only students can register). Classes start on August 31st…

I’m working with a grad student who needs to create a new shapefile from scratch, and thought I’d turn the instructions for doing this in ArcGIS into a tutorial / post for creating new point layers. The idea in this example is to create a point layer that shows the relative center of 291 neighborhoods in New York City. Since many of these neighborhoods are place names without finite boundaries, we’ll have to use various sources (NYC Planning map and Rand McNally street maps) to pinpoint the relative center of each neighborhood.

These points will be used for labeling each neighborhood. In this case, creating a new, georeferenced layer is preferable to creating 291 text labels on a map that are not tied to geography in any way.

• The first step is to download some layers from the NYC Department of Planning to use for reference, such as a layer for boroughs and community districts. Community districts are used by the city to approximate neighborhoods. Many of the neighborhoods that we are trying to plot are, in many cases, smaller areas or places within these boundaries.

• Next, open ArcCatalog and create a folder to store the data. Then, right click on the folder in the table of contents and select New – Shapefile. In the Create New Shapefile window, we give the shapefile a name, select Point as the feature type, and hit Edit to change the
  coordinate system. In the Spatial Reference Properties menu, we’ll import a coordinate system from one of the files we downloaded from NYC Planning, which uses New York State Plane for Long Island. Click OK and OK again, and we’ll have a new shapefile.

• Right now, our new shapefile isn’t very exciting because it’s empty – you can preview it in the catalog to see for yourself. If you preview the table, you’ll see that Arc created three fields – FID, Shape, and ID, which it will automatically fill in when we start creating features. Before we do that, we’ll have to add an additional column to store the name of the neighborhood. To do that, open ArcMap and add the neighborhood layer to the map. Then, right click on the layer in the Table of Contents and open the attribute table. Hit the Options button and choose Add Field. In the Add Field menu, name the new field, choose Text as the type, and change the length to 80 (in case we have some neighborhoods with long names). Hit OK, and you’ll have a new field.

• Let’s add our reference layers next. Hit the Add Data button (or File – Add Data), and add the borough boundaries and community districts (if you don’t see anything after you add them, right click on one of these layers and choose Zoom to Layer). Go into the symbology tab for each layer and change their display to make the areas appear more distinctive. Make sure your neighborhood layer is on top of your other layers.

• Now it’s time to start plotting neighborhoods. Go to the Selection menu – Set selectable Layers, and turn off all the layers except the neighborhood layer. Then, use the dropdown on the Editor Toolbar and Select Start Editing (if you don’t see the Editor Toolbar, make sure it’s activated by going to View – Toolbars and select it). On the Editor Toolbar, make sure the Create New Feature task is activated and that the target layer is the neighborhood layer, and not any of the reference layers. Zoom in to the top of Manhattan. With the Pencil tool selected in the toolbar, and using your sources (NYC planning map, Rand McNally street map, whatever), click on the map to approximate where the center of the Inwood neighborhood would be. A blue dot should appear on the map. Then right-click on the neighborhoods layer in the Table of Contents and open the attributes table. You’ll see a brand new record for your new dot. Click in the empty field for Name, type in the name of the neighborhood, and press enter.

• That’s the process! Next, locate the area for Washington Heights and click on the map to create the point for that neighborhood. The new dot will appear hi-lighted, while the previous dot for Inwood will now appear as a regular point symbol. Now it’s just a matter of plugging away. Make sure to occasionally save your edits by clicking Editor and choosing Save Edits. If you make a mistake, you can delete a feature by selecting the Select Feature tool in the regular tool bar (white arrow with a blue and white feature box next to it), select the particular point, and hit the delete key. If you’re having trouble pinpointing the right location for the neighborhood, try downloading additional reference layers to guide you. The NYC DOITT also has a page with GIS layers for the city with features like parks and streets that may be helpful. When you’re finished editing, choose Stop Editing under the Editor Toolbar.

• The ultimate goal of this exercise was to get neighborhood labels to appear without the actual point. To accomplish this, change the point symbol for the neighborhood to nothing by going into the Symbology tab for the layer and reducing the fill to no color, the outline to nothing, and the size to zero. Then open the Labels tab under the Properties menu, turn labels on using the name field as the label field, select Placement Properties and choose the setting to place the labels on top of the point, hit ok, and voila! Perfectly centered neighborhood names that are part of a georeferenced layer.

This covers the basics. In the next post, I’ll go a little further and discuss adding additional fields to the new file, without having to type them in manually.

I’m flying out to Seattle tonight, and will eventually be driving back to New York, after side trips to Vancouver BC, Olympia, and San Fran. When I moved to Seattle for grad school back in 2005, I used a Rand McNally road atlas to plot time and distances between stops. This time around I used Google Maps, which made it much easier to fiddle around with spacing the stops out. You can check out my plan (for Seattle to New York via San Fran) here. Place names and Long / Lat coordinates get passed through the url, making it easy to hack together your own map.

I’m still taking that road atlas with me though!

It’s been awhile since my last post – I’ve been locked away in my apartment on research leave for the past two weeks. I’m working on a database-backed web directory for finding GIS data, as I’m tired of dealing with bookmarks, html lists, and protracted web searches for keeping track of datasets. The goal is to keep it simple and standards-based. The basic architecture is in place; I’m just struggling to learn and apply PHP. Fingers crossed, I may have a prototype ready by the end of my next round of leave this summer.

I’m also still reading Georeferencing by Linda Hill, which extensively covers gazetteers and and metadata standards.  It’s definetly worth checking out, from a library near you.