At the end of this lab you should have
- loaded some of the proprietary ESRI data into ArcView
- created and saved an ArcView "project"
- loaded in some Cancer and nuclear site Data for Illinois (the same data used in Geoff Jacquez's reference for this module).
- loaded in the data you downloaded from the census site from the first module's lab
- saved the assembled project to your course home page area
- manipulated the data: zooming, selecting, map queries, overlays, buffering,....
- printed a sensible plot of the cancer data, with your interpretations of the visual pattern of the cancer you've chosen.
- You'll need to provide a home for the work you are about to do
in your web page area. In the previous module we created a data directory in
your
account, under your
web directory. This time, you should create a
subdirectory of that directory called "illinois" (actually you can call it
whatever you want, but I will refer to it in the following as your illinois
directory).
Umich students: the easy way to do this is from your "My IFS Home Directory" on the Windows desktop.
In the rest of this exercise, you should save all of your work there.
Umich students: Recall the space issues discussed last week: if you're concerned about disk usage, see me! You can do this lab using any directory, e.g. the C:\Temp directory.
- Before you load ArcView, let me warn you that ArcView has a
voracious appetite for computer memory: your computer may be
painfully slow, especially with a web browser like Netscape open as
well. One suggestion is to make Netscape wide and short, so that you can
just see a few lines of text, and make ArcView fill the rest of the space.
Now it's time to dive into ArcView, with applications to Illinois cancer rate data. This will include
- data manipulation:
- data importing and exporting
- data file format conversions (e.g. ASCII .csv to ArcView .shp shapefile)
- data visualization:
- choropleth maps (more on those in the next module)
- overlays
- map queries/buffering
On a personal note, let me mention that I find ArcView a "challenging" piece of software. One thing I mean by that is that if I use it on Monday, and take a day off Tuesday, then I'll have forgotten how to use it by Wednesday: too many buttons, too many windows, too many options! See what you think....
- data manipulation:
- There are a lot of interesting links below. You might just have
a look, to see what's there, even if you don't have time to surf them all
now. Please let me know if there
are any broken links, as I personally hate that!
- Please
evaluate this lab. We'd like to improve our labs, and value your
suggestions.
Principal Readings:
- Croner et al. 1996. Geographic Information Systems (GIS): New Perspectives in Understanding Human Health and Environmental Relationships. Statistics in Medicine 15:1961-1977. (some notes)
- Jacquez, G. M. and L. I. Kheifets. 1993. Synthetic cancer variables and the construction and testing of synthetic risk maps. Statistics in Medicine 12:1931-1942. (short summary)
- Bailey, T. C. and A. C. Gatrell. 1995. Interactive Spatial Data Analysis. Longman Scientific & Technical. pp. 48-62.
- Sokal, R. R. and G. M. Jacquez. 1991. Testing inferences about microevolutionary processes by means of spatial autocorrelation analysis. Evolution 45:152-168.
- Illinois cancer data
- Illinois County Boundaries (ArcView shapefile, as a zip file), and associated metadata. These county outlines are much more detailed than the ESRI counties which we actually use in the lab.
- census data (from our first module's lab)
- The GeoMed Arcview FAQ; if you have problems and need a solution, ask a question and we'll add it to our FAQ (with the solution, hopefully!).
- On
Epidemiology and Geographic Information Systems: A Review and
Discussion of Future Directions [Original reference pulled from this site.]
History - Here's a nice survey of the
history of mapping.
Future - The Open GIS Consortium
is working towards
interoperability in the GIS world - making applications work
together for the betterment of everyone. This is a corporation "whose
mission is to promote the development and use of advanced open systems
standards and techniques in the area of geoprocessing and related
information technologies."
Software - Luc Anselin, author of SpaceStat, provides an ArcView extension that allows one to add the coordinates of a shapefile of points (or centroids to areas) to the corresponding table.
- ESRI - maker of ArcView and ArcInfo. Here's a page with some links to ArcView resources.
- MapInfo, including a viewer that those who don't have MapInfo can use to view MapInfo maps.
- ESRI Virtual Campus
- A University of Michigan tutorial on Creating a Map of Census Data Using a Geographic Information System. This is one link off of a more general site concerning Epidemiology Data in Michigan.
- ArcInfo tutorial Home Page: The guy spent a good deal of time describing how to get a project (and a complicated and interesting one) into ArcInfo, how to do the analysis, etc. Good job!
- Map Maker, "a low-cost and easy to use, map making program and GIS for Windows. Its product literature states that within hours a non-expert can start to produce useful maps, and was originally designed for projects in developing countries where low-cost and ease of use are essential."
- PopMap was developed by the University of Hanoi for the United Nations Development Program. The program is freeware and "provides maps and graphics database support for planning and administration of population activities with important geographical or logistical context, or for facilitating geographical or graphical expression of population indicators and related data."
- IDRISI, another major GIS package.
- Grass Home page, and another page of useful info, GRASS 4.2.1 Main page at Hannover, Germany; also the GRASS 4.2.1 Linux binary page at Hannover. The PC version of grass is commercial (Blackland GRASS), whereas the UNIX version is public domain.
- ADE-4
is a program for Ecological Data
Analysis.
Methods A really fun (okay, just fun!) map projections page. The map at right is a projection of the world onto a 14-faceted "GlobeMap". Another one, more business than fun. I got both of these from this generally useful site. 
- Matching the Map Projection to the Need.
-
Basic Map Concepts, from which I took this image which shows the distortions that occur in latitude/longitude coordinates toward the poles. - GIS FAQ
- The Canadian International Development Research Centre has an online document GIS for Health and the Environment
- NCGIA Home Page, which referenced Other WWW Sites of Interest, and Instructor Resources from NCGIA. The last contains references to some of the other resources listed here, including that to UBC.
- Gerard Rushton at the University of Iowa has produced a guide to the use of GIS in health research:
- Schlosser
Geographic (MapInfo), including their page
what is geocoding?
Examples - Geographic Information Systems and Public Health in Public Health Reports (NCI).
- An example illustrating the Applications of GIS for population analysis: A demonstration for Nepal, from the UN.
- Who's HealthMapper page Using GIS in public health.
- The World Bank's
Poverty Maps
for the world.
Data Products - "This superb list of International GIS sites is from Tom
Anderson, a physician-GISer in WA State. Is there a site for Middle East
(especially Gaza Strip) , African or Indian Subcontinent data? Sri Lanka?"
Date: Sat, 8 May 1999 10:54:32 -0700 From: "Richard E. Hoskins"
- Another page of useful links.
- U.S. places, counties, zips in ASCII format, with latitudes and longitudes.
- Global Population data, and a whole lot more!
- CIESIN Home Page, with
links to interactive demos/tools such as the ddviewer (Demographic
Data Viewer 3.0) mentioned above,
and ddcarto, which
"provides digital coverages of U.S. Census demographics to GIS users. Atlas
GIS, ARC/INFO, and MapInfo formats are supported. The data are provided
freely for research and instructional use only. © 1996, 1997 CIESIN All
Rights Reserved
Our GIS files are stored in Atlas GIS export (.bna) format. You can retrieve these in just minutes. We batch process format conversion jobs after work hours when our loads are lower, so converting to Arc/Info (.e00) or MapInfo (.mid .mif) format is an overnight process. You will be notified by email where and how to ftp the converted coverage you order."
- U.S. census, e.g. CENSUS
- County Population Estimates. You might want to try their new http://factfinder.census.gov/java_prod/dads.ui.homePage.HomePage,
for data and on-line mapping:
From: cmb04@health.state.ny.us To: WAPHGIS@u.washington.edu
"American FactFinder is a data access and mapping components World Wide Web technology tool for the general public to get quick access to Census information. American FactFinder accesses data from the Decennial Censuses of Population and Housing, the American Community Survey (with updates of the decennial census data collected every year beginning about 2002), and the 1997 Economic Census. One can search Census STF databases, with metadata description, and format the results to create customized tables (or download to spreadsheets), construct reference maps to show boundaries and features for geographic entities, and produce quick thematic maps to reveal geographic patterns in statistical data. There is ongoing discussion as to how the full Decennial microdata files data can be included with confidentiality filters. The main contractor for FactFinder is IBM, with ORACLE handling the database and ESRI the mapping components, respectively."
Colene Byrne Public Health Information Group
New York State Dept. of Health
Room 750 Corning Tower 518-474-2543
cmb04@health.state.ny.us - CensusCD - Complete US Census on a single CD with 375,000+ areas, 3500+ demographic variables, powerful Windows interface, convenience, geocoding, extensive help, affordability, census, STF3, demographics, statistics, data, compression, geocoding, censuscd, Geolytics, research, marketing, population, housing, income, race, education, family, language, employment, poverty, tract, block group, MSA, ZIP, county, state, US, United States, geography, rent neighborhood, urban, social, gender, occupation, children, costs, mapping, GIS.
- Managing Confidentiality: Building blocks for the Protection of and Access to Health Data, by Mark Reichardt and Doug Nebert, Federal Geographic Data Committee (A Power Point presentation on patient confidentiality). Includes nice MetaData information.
- Geocode your U.S. street address, or a whole town. This one allows you to get some lat/longs for landmarks in a county (say).
- Global Land
Information System, especially LULC
(Land Use and Land Cover) (1:250,000 scale) maps for the United States.
Also check out this site
for the location of DEMs, digital elevation model maps.
Some other folks' collections of links: - A course at the U. of British Columbia, with loads of resources that you might check out.
- University of Waterloo Electronic Library's Cartographic Materials Page.
- intro pages, ARC/INFO, IDRISI
- "textbooks" for Atlas GIS and IDRISI
- an index of World-Wide Web (WWW) servers "which are likely to be of interest to the GIS community".
- Rutgers has some nice links to data and software.
- This site also has some links to check out, including a GIS FAQ.