Week 6: Location Decisions

For much of this lab I felt very frustrated - suffering from jet lag and working with a Really Slow laptop. Also I didn't discover a vital starting point for Project 2 until I had completed almost all of Project 1 (in an effort to discover the starting point for Project 2) - and I have run into more than the usual roadblocks. However I did get to the end in time. So...

This lab was about a hypothetical couple making a decision to relocate to Alachua County, Florida to be closer to family, with other factors also included. The lab involved calculating distances, reclassifying the distance calculations, and producing weighted overlays that would come up with the "best" census tracts in the county for this particular couple.

The base map (not shown ) is of various features in Alachua County that the hypothetical grandparents (with grandkids who live in the selected-in-red census tract) might want to be close to. This was a fairly basic map.

The second map (see top right) was probably the most complicated one I have done so far. I still need to learn how to work with map templates, as the arrangements were complicated for me and I removed all the four data layer displays in order to make the succeeding map. This second map (one map with five layouts, or five layouts with one map, don't know which) shows the distance from various features that the grandparents might be interested in - North Florida Regional Medical Center, the census tract containing their grandkids, bus routes, community centers, and the University of Florida.

I eventually got the models to run correctly - or at least to run and to display and to acknowledge that they existed, which initially they refused to do - I briefly posted a screenshot on this blog that said ArcMap said the model had run successfully, as proof in the absence of any other! I am troubled by the models though because when I reversed the scales, the bottom number (the 9) wouldn't reverse. But I couldn't get the model to run properly when I tried fixing those numbers in the model prior to running it, so eventually I left the numbers alone and just reversed them with one click. The map at top left shows the final weighted overlays from the models.

I am still a bit confused about whether I have done the reclassification correctly. Not all the distance calculations yielded the same distance per category, so I ended up with some smaller numbers of categories. I'd like to understand this better but after spending about 20 hours on this+project 1 (I blame this partly on the laptop; I didn't have a chance to print out all of the pdfs before I left town and was unsuccessful in trying to connect remotely on other people's computers so that I could print the pdfs elsewhere, so for this lab I have been reading the project1&2 pdfs on screen, which is dismayingly slow to advance each part of a page. Hence I didn't see the note about which census tract to use for project 2 until I had worked my way almost all the way through project 1 looking for the answer), I didn't feel I had the time to ask more questions about it.

On the plus side, I learned a lot in this lab and I feel good about managing to get a lot of information in fairly clear format on to one page. I am grateful for the information about setting environments and organizing data within ArcMap. (Now, about those map templates...)