Author: egmcnichols

Chapter 1 –

Everything in this chapter was pretty easy and straightforward. The first time I tried running the program though it tried backing up my files and the computer froze. Getting to mess around in the 3D environment was cool, it reminded me of a project called 177776: The Future of Football, that I highly recommend reading. That project makes frequent use of models like the one we were working with in this chapter.

Chapter 2 –

My popups don’t seem to populate with any information, but as it hasn’t stopped me from what I need to do yet I’m finishing the work I’m assigned and will figure it out later. Ran into an error with tutorial 2.4 where the “Over age 60 receiving food stamps” layer didn’t have a valid data source, unsure how to fix that. The language in the text book of “Out Beyond” is outdated for Maximum/Minimum scale and I wasted a few minutes looking for a feature that’s not in the program.

Chapter 3 –

Sometimes the textbook refers to the Content Pane as the Catalog Pane and that’s caused me confusion. In 3.2 I am unable to share the maps because I don’t have publishing privileges. I don’t know what could be causing this issue, as I did all the registration steps that we needed to for ArcGIS. In 3.3 it said I am unable to log in to my account, not that my account didn’t exist, so I’m not sure what to do there but I did read the chapter. This barrier also means I can’t complete 3.4. I’ll come back for these assignments, but there’s other work I need to finish for this class first.

Hi! I’m Ethan McNichols, I’m a senior Environmental Studies major and double minor in Data & Society and Social Justice. I’m a member of OWU’s cross country and track teams, and on campus I’m involved with the TTRPG club (games like Dungeons and Dragons) and TCG club (like Magic the Gathering)

Prior to this course, I’ve had some amount of experience with GIS due to my summer internship at the Ohio EPA. I worked in the Stormwater program in the Department of Surface Water, and would use their internal GIS system primarily to locate permitted locations to conduct storm water inspections at. I also did some editing and correction of the dataset the software was operating off of, as there was a large batch of permits that had incorrect or missing location values. As the reading gets into GIS is an incredibly broad term and I’ve only had meaningful interaction with a very small part of that umbrella, so I’m excited to learn more throughout this class.  I think its interesting that some GIS scholars view its conception as an inevitability, the natural conclusion to the converging technologies and disciplines of the time, especially as it relates to the documentation and interaction with population data like the census. I really enjoyed reading about the back and forth about GIS as the visualization of spatial patterns and the “intuitive” reasoning that it interacts with, as well as the distinction between GIS as science and as system as the field has grown and established itself.

A use of GIS technology that I find incredibly compelling is the website Queering the Map, where a community-generated database of personal moments and stories with the user’s queerness are mapped onto relevant locations. We’ve got a few of these data points on campus at the dorms and SLUs, and there are a few more scattered throughout Delaware. The project is a documentation of a spatial relationship to queerness, the places and communities that hold those experiences.

The other GIS system I looked at was GIS for Climate, a database maintained by ESRI which contains filters for flooding projections in the United States, days above 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and a lot of other climate change related spatial analysis.