Blog Week 2
Chapter 1
It was interesting learning about the different attributes that are all included in GIS, for example, components such as vectors and rasters. Previously, before this from math class, I had already had an understanding of what a vector is, the actual separation within the map being/had been made. Although I hadn’t heard of what a raster was before this reading, from what I understood from the description, a raster is the geographic area that you are separating from others. Essentially, rosters and vectors form the basis of what GIS operates on, while creating several other methods of organization and overlay. Examples of this are your categories that separate your types of data, or ranks that allow you to have an understanding of the value of things within a certain data set. While counts, amounts, and ratios are a little bit different, considering they’re not a continuous set of data, while categories and ranks are.
GIS as a program seems to me to be a process of sectioning out and boarding things. It’s interesting to see the examples in the text have such a wide variety; it makes me wonder how many different fields of work/career fields this system has made a bit easier. With the examples used, it ranged anywhere from the borders of land ownership, crime, or even the literal borders of different vegetation.
With the use of categories that seem to allow GIS to be an extremely organized system. All while allowing you to overlay different data on top of one another, whether that be looking at the businesses and crime rates together or any other kind of variant. The process of finding specific information that was explained later in the chapter was interesting in how it essentially involves putting in a variety of necessary terms to find the exact information that you need.
Chapter 2
Throughout chapter two for the mapping process in GIS, there is a heavy focus on how to categorize the information within your maps. Quite a large portion of the information describes how to build a map of the necessary features/information that you are attempting to depict. Some of the things I understood were in relation to what content you want to be the focus of the map, like highlighting features in darker colors to bring more attention to those areas. It is very easy to build an overwhelming map, so an important thing to remember is not add more than 7 categories, as mentioned in the chapter. Another way was to combine categories to make them easier to view and understand. With this being said, from what I understand, it seemed like a give-and-take process because it’s easy to lose information while combining categories.
There is also a big emphasis on the symbols you use within your maps, based on the visibility of the symbols and being able to tell the difference between them. Essentially, a majority of the reading is based on the visibility of the maps to the viewer. There was a huge emphasis on the colors used for categories, like using different color schemes can allow for more emphasis on different parts of the map and allow for focus among those categories, while other color schemes can make a map overwhelming to look at for the viewer and become more confusing. Also it seems important to emphasize correlating categories with similar colors as well. The dot data was also interesting to me because it reminded me a lot of when you look at germs or organisms under a microscope, which is a fun comparison since were looking at math data essentially.
Although I struggled quite a bit trying to understand the record and database information.
Chapter 3
For this chapter, as well theres so much information that emphasizes the details of mapping. Which sounds a bit redundant, but it is essentially focusing on the details of spreading out information that explicitly shows the information you want in a way the viewer can best understand. The process of most and least mapping is kind of confusing to me, but from what I could understand about the concept, is allowing the reader or viewer to see the value of the categories through what the chapter was explaining about ranks. This is at least one of the reasons why we should be mapping most and least values. One of the examples used in the chapter was about the temperature of different areas.
Chapter 3 also felt very repetitive in many of the explanations, for part of it I seemed like it was repeating word for word what had been said in the previous chapter.
It’s also really interesting how much GIS ( at least many of the examples within the chapters) is predominantly focused on urban planning.
The classification scheme was really confusing to me. I think the overall idea is that different schemes have different ways of classifying information, and there are ways to tweak it to support your data most accurately. While reading the chapter, I was having a really hard time understanding the concept. Also, defining classes seemed kind of complicated because they essentially have to shift the numbers around to define the classes so that the data stays within the appropriate group instead of getting mixed up. It also seems really easy to misinterpret this data because of how complex this issue seems to me, at least. Overall, mapping seems to have a main prerogative around mapping data in a way that is easy for the viewer to understand.