[Introductory notes: Do not use spaces or other special characters when naming files or directories; stick with lower-case letters, digits and the undescore character--no spaces! Note the drive letter of your flash drive, and keep track of your files on it. When ending a work session, you can "save" the state of your session as a map (MXD) file, but be aware that MXD files are easily corrupted; it is usually easier to simply reload your layer files into a new map than reconstruct an old map file. Note that an MXD file does not contain any GIS data; it just references the source files. To make an ArcMap project portable you need to create a map package file (.MPK) containing both the MXD file and the actual data.]

The data for this project are in a zipped "personal geodatabase" called proj1.mdb; download proj1.zip to an appropriate folder on your flash drive and unzip it.

Open an ArcMap session with empty Table of Contents and Map frames, add a Catalog frame on the right, and make a folder connection to the proj1 geodatabase. Specify it as the default geodatabase, and add its five layers--counties and lakes (polygons), rivers and roads (lines), and cities (points)--to your map.

The initial display will treat the lat-lon coordinates as if they were planar coordinates, so this unprojected map will look pretty distorted. Right-click on "Layers" (the default name of the Dataframe) at the top of the Table of Contents frame, and select its Properties menu; under the "Coordinate System" tab choose a decent-looking display projection (any of the Predefined--Projected--Continental--North America--USA Contiguous projections should look okay).  Zoom your map to just the continental US.

If you click the display order tab at the top of the table of contents frame, you can re-sort (drag and drop) the layers in the legend so you have the following display order (bottom to top): counties, lakes, rivers, roads, cities.  Now display cities as tiny (1- or 2-pixel) green dots, highways as thin red lines; rivers as blue lines, lakes as blue, and counties with light gray outline color and whatever fill color you like.   If the map looks too busy, uncheck the display box for the cities and/or roads so you don't see them in the map.

Each shapefile includes a database table of attributes for the geographic features in it. Open the attribute table for the county shapefile. I included a lot of data from the 2000 Census and some other sources. Here are the attribute field definitions.

Dissolving counties to create a states shapefile:   Use the Dissolve geoprocessing tool to create a new states layer by dissolving boundaries between counties using STATE_NAME as the Dissove Field. In the Statistics Fields pull-down, select POP1990 with Statistic Type SUM, and POP2000 with Statistic Type SUM.

After the Dissolve is completed you should see the states layer appear. Open its Attribute Table to check that the sums of POP1990 and POP2000 are included. Display the states with black outlines and no fill color on top of counties with a light gray outline and whatever fill color you like.

Selection problems. For each one, zoom the view to the relevant features and use File--Export Map to create a PNG-format image file of your map. Adjust the resolution so the image width and height are the desired size. A simple map can be as small as 400 wide; a detailed map could be 1000 pixels wide or bigger. (Note that Maps displayed side by side look best if their heights are the same, and maps displayed in a column look best with equal widths.)

1. Calculate the total area of the five Great Lakes (units are square miles).
   How many US counties border the Great Lakes? (Note that Arc's Select-by-Location has lots of alternative criteria: share a boundary, intersect, etc., that may yield inconsistent results.)
   Calculate the overall population density in 2000 of the counties bordering the Great Lakes. (Note that the average of these counties' population densities is not the same as their overall population density.)
   Zoom to these counties and export a .PNG map image.
2. How many counties intersect some major river portion of the Mississippi River System (not just the Mississippi itself)?
   What was the total population of these counties in 2000?
   Zoom to the selected Mississippi counties and export a .PNG map image.
3. How many counties in the US had negative population growth between 1990 and 2000?
   Set the display to encompass just the continental US and export a .PNG with these counties selected.
4. Use Select-by-Location to select the counties "within" 200 miles of New Castle County, Delaware.
   (Note how the spatial selection methods let you apply the "within 200 miles" criterion in different ways that yield different results!)
   Now use the Geoprocessing Buffer tool to create a 200-mile radius ring feature around New Castle County.
   It will look egg-shaped, because the Counties shapefile is in lat-lon coordinates and the Buffer tool only works correctly on projected shapefiles.
   Right-click on Counties and use Data-Export Data to create another version of the Counties shapefile in the coordinate system of the data frame.
   Rerun the Buffer tool on this new shapefile; you should get a correct near-circular buffer.
   Select the counties that are "within" this buffer. What was their total population in 2000?
   Zoom to this area and export a .PNG map of it,
5. How many individual US counties have larger area than the whole state of Delaware?
   Export a .PNG of the continental US with these counties highlighted.
6. How many US counties are intersected by an interstate or equivalent highway in the roads shapefile?
   What was the overall percent population growth between 1990 and 2000 in these counties?
   What was the overall percent population growth in counties not intersected by an interstate highway?
   Export a .PNG of this. 

Thematic mapping methods: Open the States attribute table. You will see that "Shape_Length" and "Shape_Area" fields were automatically created by the Dissolve tool, but the measurements are useless because they are in degrees. And add a new field of type "Double" named "AREA." Right-click on the new field header and use "Calculate Geometry" to calculate true areas (in square miles) based on the projected coordinate system rather than lat-lon.

Now use the state shapefile's Properties--Symbology to create a state-level quantitative map of POP2000 normalized by AREA. Display state population densities using a cool-to-hot color ramp, and export an image of this map.

Use the US counties shapefile with the same color ramp and the same number of classes (7 to 10), to create quantitative Natural Breaks, Equal Interval and Quantile maps of WHITES normalized by POP2000. Export uniformly-sized PNG images of these three maps. (Try transparent county boundaries so you can see the fill colors of the small counties better; overlay the state boundaries.)
Create equivalent Natural Breaks, Equal Interval and Quantile maps of BLACKS normalized by POP2000, and export PNG images of these.
Create equivalent Natural Breaks, Equal Interval and Quantile maps of HISPANICS normalized by POP2000, and export PNG images of these.
Which method gives the truest-looking representation of the distributions of whites, blacks and Hispanics in the US?

Create a county dot-density map of POP2000, with one-pixel dots, each dot representing 10,000 people. Export a PNG image of this.

More Geoprocessing tools:   Use the Geoprocessing Clip tool to clip the States layer by the 200-mile-radius buffer around New Castle County that you created earlier. Open the attribute table of the new clipped features. Note that the fields, including the AREA field, are simply imported from the States layer. Add a CLIP_AREA (type Double) field and use Calculate Geometry to calculate the area of each clipped polygon. Calculate the proportion of each state's area that is within 200 miles of New Castle County.

The one cartographically complete map you will make in this course:   Check the county attribute field definitions and create a thematic map of counties in the continental US showing the geographic pattern in some Census variable(s). Once you get a good-looing map in the Data view of the map frame, switch to the Layout view. Switch page orientation to landscape, and position the map so it fills most of the frame. Add the other map elements around it: a title that explains the story in the data, a legend explaining whatever thematics you use, a scale bar, north arrow or compass rose, a text box specifying the map's projection, additional explanatory text, photos or other graphics to fill empty areas... Export your finished map as a larger-scale PNG (800-1100 pixels wide) image file.

Editing tables:   Add a new field "ELDERLY" in the US_Counties attribute table and use the Field Calculator to add FEMAL65UP and MALES65UP. Create a thematic map of ELDERLY normalized by POP2000 (i.e. percent elderly) across the continental US. Export a PNG image of this map.

Now add a new field "PCTELDERLY" in the US_Counties attribute table, and use the Field Calculator to divide ELDERLY by POP2000. There are two counties with zero populations that will mess up the calculation (divide-by-zero error). Figure out how to get PCTELDERLY calculated correctly for all the other counties, skipping these two.

Summarize tables and Table Joins: In the counties shapefile's attribute table, Summarize on the STATE_NAME field. Include Sums of the POP2000, WHITE, BLACK, HISPANIC, FEMAL65UP and MALES65UP fields, and the Average of the PCTELDERLY field in the output table. This will create a free-standing table with these fields summarized by state. Create a new field in this table, and calculate (FEMAL65UP + MALE65UP)/POP2000 by state in it. Note that these percent elderly numbers are inconsistent with the averages from the US_counties. Explain why. (Make sure the overall population density you calculated for the Great Lakes counties is correct!)

Right-click on states in the legend, and join the free-standing Summarize table onto the end of the states layer's attribute table, matching on the STATE_NAME fields. (Do not join the shapefile attribute table onto the end of the summarize table.) Map the true percent elderly by state, and export a .PNG image of this map.

Create a PCTBLACK field and calculate percent Black by state. Now remove the Summarize table join from the state shapefile. Which table retains the PCTBLACK field that you calculated--the Summarize table or the shapefile attribute table?

Editing tables:   Select the 12 northeast states (ME, NH, VT, MA, RI, CT, NY, PA, NJ, DE, MD, WV).  Add a new text field to the states shapefile attribute table to hold these 2-letter state abbreviations. Open the Editor toolbar, and use it to Start Editing in the directory containing the states shapefile. Type the abbreviations into the state abbreviations field. Then Stop Editing, saving your edits.

Editing features: The counties shapefile includes "counties and county equivalents" from before 2000. Since then,

• Dade County, Florida (12025) got renamed as Miami-Dade County and given a new FIPS code (12086)
• In Montana, Yellowstone National Park got split between Gallatin and Park Counties.
• In Colorado, Broomfield County (08014) was created from parts of Adams, Boulder, Jefferson and Weld Counties (you can find a boundary shapefile for Broomfield County on the Census Bureau's website)
• In Virginia, Clifton Forge independent city was merged into Alleghany County, and South Boston independent city was merged into Halifax County.
• In Alaska...who cares?

Now download my county-level compilation of the 2010 Census data. This Excel file has two tabs, one with the data and one with variable definitions. Create a cool thematic map of counties in the continental US using whatever variable(s) interest you.

The only time you will ever use ArcMap's horrible chart utility:   Create a bar graph with labeled columns showing percent changes in population in just the 12 Northeast states between 2000 and 2010 (you will have to sum their 2010 county populations). Put the 2-letter state abbreviations as labels under each column; include gridlines and an appropriate title.  Save a PNG image file of this graph to include in your web page. (So much for Arc's charts; next time, use Excel instead!)

Create your webpage report: Transfer all your finished .PNG image files to the Copland server in a public_html/frec480/proj1 subdirectory for inclusion in your project web page.
Edit your "index.html" project homepage in the proj1 subdirectory to include an image tag like <IMG SRC="geezers.png"> for each .PNG that you created.
Use Pico or Notepad to insert appropriate text for each map, and include answers to the selection questions.
If you like, you can display the Natural Breaks, Equal Interval and Quantile maps of whites, blacks and Hispanics in a 3x3 HTML table.

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