This week I very much enjoyed reading Introduction to Web Mapping. In Spring 2014 I took Geography 7, Introduction to GIS, here at UCLA. I really enjoyed this class and hoped to incorporate some of what I had learned in that class into what I was creating for my digital humanities project. Although I had at least heard most of the information in the lesson, it was a very good refresher.
In Geography 7, I learned the basics of QGIS and created a new project each week, and they continued to get hard and harder as the weeks progressed. By the end of the quarter I was able to make a project that I was extremely proud of. In this project I had downloaded a map with all of the voting districts in California and chose on in the Los Angeles area to focus on. I then found the voting information from the 2012 elections. After linking this information to the map, I was able to create many versions of a static map. These included maps based on results from the 2012 General election in terms of voter registration, voter turnout, and voter political preference. With this information, I then created maps that showed precincts to either target or avoid when campaigning in an upcoming election, based on my earlier previous maps.
At the time of creating these maps, I didn’t refer to them as static web maps, but after reading this article, I realized that is what they were. In addition to being static though, these maps are also personalized because, although the data collected represents a snapshot in time, I created the color scheme, classification method, title, legend, scale bar, and other aspects that can be created in QGIS.
The most new information for me, involved the history of Internet mapping because in Geography 7, we had mostly focused on how to actually map. I am constantly impressed by virtual map technologies like Google Earth and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, so it was incredibly interesting to see how these systems developed. It is hard to believe that this many steps in virtual mapping have been made in the only 21 years since the first Internet map viewer was produced in 1993. Although I don’t understand the coding being referenced in each of the progressions from generation to generation, I can understand, in words, some of the capabilities that were developed. I am very excited for this week because we will be talking about something I am at least slightly familiar with and eager to help my group with that.
Below I included some examples of the maps that were included in my Geography 7 class that I described.
