Michell's GIS Journey

  This week’s assignment was about Typography and the Typographic methods. We learned about the proper elements that should be included on a map such as a title, a scale bar, and a legend. The objectives of this week’s lab were to create a map of Florida with major cities, rivers, and swamps shown. We had to select certain features and label them. ArcGIS Pro was used for the mapping. I used the add data function to add the features to the map, then used the label function to add the labels that I needed. I used Queries in order to select the features that I wanted to be highlighted. Then I created my layout map and added all the elements. As far as customizing my map, I did the following: First, I changed the color scheme of the map because I wanted to experiment with different colors. I choose the colors because I like how they go together and I like the feeling of them. Second, I changed the city dot symbols by making them larger, and changing the circle. I used circle 5. Lastl...

      This week's lesson was about the history of Cartography, the commandments when making maps, and critiquing maps. We talked about cartographers, the first maps and their evolutions, and the tools used to make maps. There are a bunch of commandments for map making, but we are only focusing on 6 of them for this class. Well-Designed Map      This is an example of a well-designed map because it follows the following commandments; Commandment 1- Map Substantial information. This map does a great job of showing substantial information and making it easy to read and be understood by most anyone. Commandment 2- Don’t lie with maps. This map seems to have accurate information, because location can be double checked by things like Google Maps. Commandment 4- Minimize Map Crap. This map is a great example of minimizing map crap. The colors of the map are neutral and easy to look at, the elements are simple, and there aren’t too many symbols that make the m...

            Hi, I'm Michell!  I was born and raised in Venezuela and moved to Orlando, FL a couple years ago.  I've always had a desire to learn GIS after taking 2 years of Geodesic engineering classes in my home country. Geographic studies have always interested me, and one of my professors suggested that I learn GIS, however; GIS courses were not offered by the college so I wasn't able to begin my studies.       Its been a bit since then and now I'm on my second course towards my certificate. I currently work full time for Disney. As far as career goals go, I don't have anything specific in mind just yet, but hopefully this will help me narrow down my goals, and open up possibilities for the future.  Here is the link to my Story map. https://arcg.is/yLPaD

 This was an interesting map to do simply because it was relatively simple to find the schools of both Counties and to add them to my map, but that was not the difficult part. The "difficult" part was finding out that there were no schools within the potential area in either county. This made me second guess myself and think that I had done something wrong or different, but nope! No schools is an answer just the same as 10 schools would have been. Overall, the final project was a great challenge that forced me to remember what I had learned throughout the course, and to use my creativity, knowledge, and technique to create these maps and final analysis.