CHall Historical Analysis through GIS

  Cartographic Tutorials There were a lot of useful tools in this tutorial in creating an informative and visually appealing map. Leaning to set definition queries was also an important skill to learn in order to visualize the desired information. The layout that was created is visually appealing but I feel that it is not the most presentable if it were to be used as an informative poster. The light color of text that is very similar to the background color along with the 'Insert Map' in the bottom right makes it a bit more difficult to see the information if it were displayed at a conference or in a presentation.

 For this map I decided to use one the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps of Columbia, SC from 1910. The process of georeferencing, creating new feature classes, and digitizing buildings is not particularly difficult but definitely time consuming in these learning stages. The block I chose to digitize had an interesting variety of types of builds including; homes, office spaces, general and furniture stores, Coca-Cola factory, printing press, and police headquarters. I did two layouts of the same map with two different fields selected for comparison, one showing a gradient of building types and the other showing number of floors. By showing these two fields I was hoping to see correlation between the types of builds and the number of floors that were average for the time period. To some degree you can see that most homes or dwellings were on average only one floor whereas the larger commercial buildings average between two and three floors. Though I think to  a larger data set should...