Mitchell Notes
Ch 1:
- GIS has become significantly more widespread and readily available since the book was first published in 1999.
- Although GIS has made such advancements so quickly, it is still fundamentally the same, as how it is used hasn’t changed significantly, which means the original basics of understanding are still necessary to implement GIS tools.
- GIS will continue to expand, and more books to assist in public understanding will be published.
- “GIS analysis is a process for looking at geographic patterns in your data and at relationships between features.”
- GIS can be simple or more complex; maps can be considered analysis or graphing with overlapping data regions.
- First step to GIS is asking a specific spatial question.
- How you explore the data depends on what your intention with the results is (more professional or casual).
- It is important to take geographic features into account when analyzing data.
- “Geographic features are discrete, continuous phenomena, or summarized by area.”
- Analysis should remain consistent, as in all data points and mapping techniques should be in the same format.
- Attributes: identify, describe, or represent a feature.
- Categories = groups of similar things.
- Ranks = order of features, high to low. Ranks are relative.
- Counts/amounts = total numbers of observations.
- Ratios = relationship between two observed quantities.
Ch 2:
- GIS takes information from a table and translates it into a mapping format.
- The style and amount of information put into a GIS graph are based on the amount of data collected and the question attempting to be answered.
- The intended audience should be considered when developing maps and figures.
- Each input needs a geographical place.
- Mapping symbols must be consistent and have a unique symbol designated to each category or feature type.
- With more categories, you may need to combine them to make the map easier to read and analyze.
- The way categories are grouped could change the way the reader interprets the information.
Ch 3:
- Mapping features based on quantity adds more depth and information to the figure.
- Goes more into depth on each attribute and how to graph them properly. Also explains each more in depth with examples