Principles and Methods of GIS

Your final projects are really diverse, they range from cartographic design and 3D models to questions about health, the environment, and urban economics.  The diversity of projects makes it it very hard for me to establish formal guidelines for length and content.  In my eyes a good project is one that tries to answer and interesting question with GIS.  This does not mean that your project has to be a series of maps.  To answer your question will need to interpret your maps and data.  If visualizations like maps and graphs will help me (or other readers) understand your argument include them, otherwise do not.  Its a good idea to have at least one map, describing the place and or data, but you don’t have to go overboard.  Even if you do not include many maps you will have to explain any GIS procedures you used to answer your question, I will be grading in part based on the level of GIS competency demonstrated by your project.

Don’t hesitate to get in touch with questions!

Good Luck!

In mid-November I’d like you to submit a literature review and some preliminary maps for your final project.  These assignments are designed to get you started on your project before the crush of finals and the end of semester madness.  This post describes the requirements for these assignments:

1. Literature Review: Find 3 academic articles, books, or in-depth magazine articles that:

• Use GIS to explore the problem, place, or process you are studying in your final project.  The articles need not be an exact fit but they should suggest an approach, a way in which others have used GIS to address a similar question.  The idea here is to avoid re-inventing the wheel – its much easier to improve a upon existing work than it is to start from scratch.
• If you cannot find articles that use GIS to explore your problem find articles that address your question without the use of GIS.  There will surely be articles in one of these two categories – as the saying goes, there is nothing new under the sun only stuff we don’t know.

Your success in this assignment will depend upon finding the right articles.  The first three articles you find are unlikely to be good ones to review.  The trick is finding interesting articles.  There are a number of ways to do this, Google Scholar for example will tell you the number of citations for an academic article.  While this is not a measure of quality it is a reasonable measure of the impact the piece has had on its readers.  Once you have identified 3 good articles write a narrative summary that:

• Has an opening paragraph introducing your problem
• Provides a detailed summary of each article
• Synthesizes the three articles noting any problems or positive things you discovered in your reading
• You’re welcome to read more than three articles (but do not review more than 10)

2. Maps: The maps should illustrate the inputs into your analysis, without necessarily completing the analysis. If your project explores how the diversity of a neighborhood relates to gentrification I would like to see a map of neighborhood diversity and gentrification…  If your project involves multiple inputs you should submit multiple maps.  While these maps are intermediate products, and not likely not be a part of your final submission I will grade with a eye toward effectiveness and readability of the map.  The maps should be self contained, I should be able to look at the map and by reading the title or caption understand what the map is communicating.