An opportunity to explore one of the spatial databases discussed in the presentation to look more closely at how their data is organized and to create your own simple spatial dataset.
Create a few spatial points of interest using the format we saw above ObjectID, X (long), Y(lat), or any other attributes you want using GoogleSheets/Excel/OpenOffice; or explore one of the databases above and practice downloading and opening the datasets to get comfortable dealing with vector datasets.
Remember to save your file as a .csv when you are done!
Some Boston Spatial Databases:
Possibly useful datasets for exploring questions about segregation and redlining.
Hospitals (download CSV)
Neighborhood boundaries (download Shapefile)
Boston Social Vulnerability (download Shapefile) [play with attribute and drawing style options]
Public Schools (download CSV)
Non-Public Schools (download CSV)
Want to check your csv data real quick? Go to Google My Maps, create a New Map, and click "Import" to import your CSV data to make sure it's looking good. Otherwise, we will be checking it later when we get to ArcGIS online!
Spatial data adds a geographic dimension to a qualitative and/or quantitative data set, situating it in a particular location within a coordinate system relative to other data points. (The coordinate system can be a real-world system or a locally created one used to meet the needs of a particular project.)
Spatial datasets, in general, come in two distinct forms, vector data (points, lines, and polygons) and raster (or pixel data). Raster and vector data can come together in the creation of a wide variety of mapping projects, from a traditional figure with an explanatory legend and caption, such as might appear in an academic text, to an online interactive platform that allows for the searching or filtering of thousands of pieces of spatial data or hundreds of historical maps.
Vector data includes points, lines, or polygons (shapes made up of straight lines) containing spatial information that represent some sort of feature or event in a physical or imagined landscape and may contain other types of qualitative or quantitative information, called attributes. A point may represent a tree, a city, or a moment in time. Lines might indicate the street grid of a town, the path someone traveled across the world, or a social link between two communities. Polygons can mark the boundaries of a country or voting district, the catchment area of a river, or a single city block.
For example, the relatively simple and ongoing World Travel and Description project from the Burn's Library collection pictured below uses vector point data to offer a selection of images and accounts from individuals and their observations about how the cities and landscapes they visited appeared. Users can filter the point data by data or search for particular location names in the search bar.
Raster consists of "cells" of data covering a specific area (its extent), with attribute values in each cell representing a particular characteristic. It may still consist of points, lines, and polygons, but these shapes are themselves composed of pixels (the way a jpeg or other image file type is).
Data of this type may take many forms, such as satellite imagery containing vegetation or elevation data, precipitation maps, or even an historical map, which has been given a spatial reference. Unlike vector data, raster data has a particular resolution, meaning each pixel represents a particular geographic region of a specific size.
Most projects combine various forms of vector and raster datasets.
