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Update on project evolution - USC Reconstruction alumni

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Given that I have been traveling for most of the time that has transpired since the last blog post (and thus unable to use ArcGIS), sharing a project update today seems a bit premature.  That being said, I know we have just three weeks left between now and the final paper submission, so I suppose it's now or never! Update on planned maps Sam, Lelia, and I were able to spend some time with the dataset last Monday and realized that it was counting some of the events in the USC Reconstruction alumni lives as alumni (i.e., their birth dates and dates of passing were coding to their identity codes), so Dr. Kennedy graciously spent some time over the holiday fixing that issue for us.  (We heard from Lelia today that she was able to manipulate the data as we had hoped, so there is good progress!)  Given the length of time remaining the course, I did realize that creating "snapshots" of the locations of the alumni at various intervals in the late 19th c. (i.e., where were they al...
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The Reconstruction students and alumni of USC

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For the final project, I'm delighted to be working with Sam and Lelia on a project initiated by Dr. Tom Brown of the history department to understand the life trajectories of the USC students from 1873-1877,  the Reconstruction years during which African American students first attended the school.  Dr. Kennedy has been advising Dr. Brown on how spatial analysis could enhance this project, and undergraduates in Dr. Brown's undergraduate history course have been undertaking most of the data wrangling.   Sources and datasets The primary "dataset," which is itself a compilation of a variety of data from many sources, has been a blog created by an emeritus math professor who has been meticulously culling data on these students to publish short biographies of them on his blog, Blind Man with a Math Degree . The blog has published some 80 biographies of undergraduates during these years (click on the tab RadicalStudent to see them), drawing upon multiple data sources like ...
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Spatial Analysis - starting to work with some new tools

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Once again, I feel like I am starting over with a whole new set of learning in this class, which is a great thing (however daunting it may be!).  In returning to the hurricane and tornado data, I realized, first and foremost, that my naming of my various map layers left a lot to be desired, and I had to spend more time that one would like with various layers' attribute tables to figure out what various layers were in fact representing.  Despite that annoyance (a lesson learned, really), I decided to try to figure out if the "mean center" of the tornado lines that we had created a few weeks ago changed over the decades.  The idea for this approach came from seeing some of my classmates' blogs that suggested both a westward shift in tornadoes over the years as well as a counter-argument that tornadoes' locations were not shifting significantly. To create such maps, I undertook a few steps: 1) I used definition queries to create lines that represented the tornado lin...
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A failed midterm and renewed practice

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 We all know that the ArcGIS Pro check did not go exactly as planned for me.  The lesson was learned: listen to the professor when he gives a very basic instruction ("pull in the shape files first").  On the upside, I now know how to change map coordinate systems "from scratch," and I also figured out which map coordinate system I needed to be able to change the map to ("USA Continuous Albers Equal Area Conic").  On the downside, it took me nearly the entire hour to figure out these two less-than-crucial pieces of information, not the most efficient use of my time. I returned to the lab today, gave myself an hour to retry the midterm, and I did much better.  Of course, I had the advantage of having seen what was expected, and I still didn't finish the whole exercise.  I also am not totally sure that I did what we needed to do correctly.  But here are my first three maps with some questions and comments.  [Edited on October 24: map 4 has now been a...
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Tornado and hurricane risk in SC the first five years of each decade of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s

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I am no master of spatial joining (yet!), and I will admit that creating these maps is still rather overwhelming for me.  But I am glad to present three maps, each of which tell something of a story about the first half of each decade from the 1970s to the 1990s and the extent to which various counties in South Carolina were susceptible to tornadoes and hurricanes during that period.  I could not figure out how to "lock in" maps in the layout setting, so I did end up having to create new maps and layouts for each of these time periods, but I am at least heartened that they are fairly similar maps.  (The bookmark function was useful, but I did learn that--depending on how "crowded" various areas on maps were--it actually helped not to have the legend in the same place on each map.) We can see that over the course of the first five years of the 1970s, large swaths of the state were affected by at least one hurricane and that the coastal and midlands areas lived throug...
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Artic Sea Ice Decline

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Like Sam, it was that week, and I'm just happy I made it through the steps.  Look forward to debriefing with ya'll about this process soon.
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Digitizing 1923 buildings in my hometown, Summerville, SC

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 I suspect that our blog posts this week are going to be a bit less analytical than those in previous weeks, given that we were largely learning how to georeference historical maps and digitize features.  Click, click, click, click.  Below, please find a georeferenced map of my hometown, Summerville, SC, in June 1923, with a few blocks of buildings digitized. There were several steps in the process that did surprise me as I georeferenced and digitized features.  First, I was not totally surprised that the blocks in downtown in 1923 more or less matched the blocks today, given that I chose the downtown area to georeference.  (There was even a little bend in the road on the bottom right corner of the map that is still there.)  I was surprised, however, to learn that the railroad tracks were in exactly the same place since I know that there have been many changes to the rail lines themselves across the SC Lowcountry.  There were some fun buildings to find...
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