Instructor: Brian Klinkenberg

Office: Room 209
Office hours: Tue / Thu
12:30-1:30

TA: Alejandro Cervantes

Office hours: Mon and Tues from 10-11 in Rm 115.

Lab Help: Jose Aparicio

Office: Room 240D

Computer Lab: Rm 115

 

 

Project Description

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Project Presentations: TBD in Geog 101

FINAL PROJECT PRESENTATION GUIDELINES

Given the number of presentations that have to be made, and the limited time that we have available in which to hear from everyone, it is very important that each presentation last no longer than 10 minutes (with 5 minutes for questions and comments afterwords). As such, you need to carefully consider what content is important to cover in your presentation, and what content should be left out. For example, you should NOT spend any of your presentation time in describing how you obtained your data, how many hours were required to clean up your data, etc. Rather, your presentation should contain:

  1. A short statement about your project (e.g., The goal for our project was to develop an inundation model of a 10-metre high tsunami for the Metro Vancouver region. Our model identified the potential risk of inundation with respect to elevation and distance from the coast. The areas at highest risk of inundation include the low-lying cities of Richmond and Delta. An estimated 400,000 ± 165,000 people reside within the forecasted risk area. Or The goal of our project was to analyze the potential effects of the Northern Gateway Pipeline on the environment and the peoples living along its route. Using multiple parameters we created different cost surfaces that were used to model different potential pipeline routes. Then, using our generated routes, as well as a route that Enbridge has proposed, we analyzed the pipeline's potential ecological and socioeconomic impacts along its path.)
  2. A very short statement of your data sources (e.g., We obtained our data from DMTI and Statistics Canada; as well, we georeferenced some of the data ourselves. Or We obtained our data from NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission as well as from the Climate BC web site.)
  3. A very short discussion on the methodology used in your project ( e.g., We followed the classic Multicriteria analysis methodology in our project--we identified the factors (list them out) and constraints (list them out) relevant to our goal and, after standardizing them, we used a weighted sum to identify the potential sites.).
  4. A discussion of your results and conclusions This is where you should spend the majority of your time--identifying your important results (e.g., presenting your maps) and discussing what they show, and then indicating whether or not your analyses achieved the goal(s) you had established.

Given the number of project results that will be presented, we have to keep everyone's presentation to a maximum of 10 minutes. IF you have not concluded your presentation within the time limit we will ask you to stop your presentation and answer any questions people may have, ensuring that everyone gets their 15 minutes (in total) of fame!

Given these guidelines, it is important that you go over your presentation before you give your presentation in order to ensure that you can navigate through your web site and find the relevant materials within the time limits. It is required that, in your web site, you do fully describe your data sources and your methodology. Given the time constraints, however, there simply isn't enough time for everyone to cover every aspect of their project.

INTRODUCTION

In this course, your class project is a significant component. In order to complete a project you need to identify a topic (or partner with someone who has identified a topic that is of interest to you) that will enable you to use your GIScience skills and demonstrate the practical knowledge that you have gained in Geob 270 and Geob 370. You should select topic that is of interest to you (e.g., if you are an urban geography major, consider working on something that uses census data; if you are a physical geography major, consider looking at slope stability). I strongly suggest that everyone discuss their proposed projects with me prior to making a final decision, since I may be able to provide some useful guidance (e.g., where to look for data, how other students have addressed the issue). Finding appropriate data sources for your project is often the most time consuming component; thus, project topics will often be constrained by data availability. Choosing a good topic to work on is challenging, but we will provide guidance and suggestions along the way.

Because of the substantial amount of work required to complete a project, it is important to plan ahead.  If you do plan ahead you will find the project and the learning process both fun and challenging.  Previous students emphasize the importance of deciding on a project topic early on in the course. This will allow you to obtain the needed data and identify the appropriate research methodology early on, and, when the data glitches and analytical snafus occur--and they almost always do--you will time to work around them.

A great place to start looking for ideas is on the internet; the links below will help you on your way.

The project marking scheme is outlined here, along with a few additional helpful hints.

Part of your project mark will be assigned by you! That is, each project team member will be required to assign a mark to themselves and to the others in their team (i.e., each team member will have 100 marks to distribute, as they see fit, to each member of the team, including themselves). This document discusses peer evaluation, and is worth reviewing.

Your project should have an abstract (a paragraph summarizing your project), a table of contents, an introduction, a section describing the methods and data used, the results, and a conclusion. It is also important to identify all of the project team members on the project's home page.

It is important to respect copyright when creating your web pages (e.g., using images from another site, taking quotes from publications). You must properly source all materials used on your pages. The library has a webpage dedicated to copyright issues: http://collections.library.ubc.ca/copyright as well as this page on how to properly cite materials: http://help.library.ubc.ca/researching/how-to-cite/.

We would also like for each project member to hand in a single, typed sheet on which they summarize their role in the project, and what they learned as a result of completing the project.

WHERE TO START

Here we will tell you some of the resources you can use to convert your project into a professional looking HTML document and have it published on the World Wide Web. The HTML resource page is a great place to get started and find help on the HTML language. A simple review of what the basic HTML codes do (such as H1, H2, etc.) can be found here.

A very simple way of creating an HTML document is to use a document template. All you need to do is to load the template, type in your paragraphs, and then save the document as an HTML file. Just make sure the file is saved as a text document with the correct extension--project.html. After saving the file, you can view it with a web browser like Firefox To do so, open Firefox, click on file in the menu, select open file, and then locate your file. Here is a simple HTML template that you can use to create your first HTML document. You can go into this document, save it onto a local drive, and then add and modify the file using either text editors or HTML editors. However, using a simple HTML template will not bring out the artistic talent in you. If you want to make your document much more attractive, you will have to be adventurous and learn a bit more about HTML. To learn more about HTML you should refer to the HTML resource page or go a bookstore and purchase a book on HTML.

Basically, there are two methods of creating your report in HTML. First, you can write your project using, for example, Word or Open Office. Most word processing programs can save your documents as HTML files. (Note that the HTML created using Word is very complex, and can create problems for some browsers. I strongly encourage you NOT to use Word to create HTML files.) Alternatively, you can use an HTML editor such as Dreamweaver to help you create the HTML file for your project from scratch. Either way, you should be able to produce good looking documents to publish on the Internet. Here is a list of HTML editors.

FINE DETAILS: You must follow the following details in creating your project web pages.

  • Although HTML editors are very handy and can be very efficient, you should beware of the problems that you might encounter; a few will be highlighted in this section.
  • Spell checking is absolutely necessary! If your HTML editor doesn't support spell checking, it is a good idea to cut and paste your text into a word processor and run a spell check in order to ensure that you have no errors.
  • Often when loading images onto your site the absolute location of the image on your local terminal is included in the reference. For example, if I am working out of the temp directory on C: called 370 and I click on the insert image icon, the image will be imbedded in the document with the following source: <img src= "file:///C|/temp/370/my_image.gif">. When the HTML file is then transferred to a remote location it will look for the image in C:/temp/370, even though the image may be present in your www directory. To avoid this, simply chop out everything between the quotes except for the actual image name from the pop up insert image box (i.e.: my_image.gif).
  • It is crucial that you remember that the department's UNIX server (where your finished work will be loaded for www access) is case sensitive to file names and extensions. Therefore, check through your entire document for links, images, files, etc. that contain UPPERCASE letters and change them to lower case!  You must also ensure that all file names (of the images, your html file, etc.) are also in lower case.
  • You must NOT have any spaces in your filenames (e.g., Final Map Showing Results.jpg should be named finalmapshowingresults.jpg)
  • All of the files used in your project must reside within the www directory (or below). It is strongly suggested that you place all images within an images directory (e.g., www/image/*.*), and all of your maps within a maps directory (e.g., www/maps/*.*), etc. A logical organization of subdirectories and files will make submission of your final project much easier for all concerned.
  • The main page for your project (e.g., the first page to load) MUST be named index.html, and should be placed in your www directory (e.g., www/index.html).
  • Although it is great to have wonderful photographic and animated images on your pages, the larger their file size the longer they will take to download. Even though your page may be artistically incredible, not everybody is going to wait several minutes for images to download. I have a general rule to try and keep most of my images below 300KB. The following section will cover images in more detail. All images used in your project must be properly cited (that is, where did you download that picture from?) and, typically, you should obtain permission first before using someone else's images.

    GRAPHICS TO HTML

    A picture is worth a thousand words. Chances are that you will want to use graphic images to convey information about your analysis and to show people the results. Note that web pages can only display a limited number of the possible graphics files formats (e.g., web browsers cannot display Window's emf files, but they can display gif and jpg images), so it is important that you explore all of the export options before deciding upon a final format. (For a complete listing of all of the known file extensions, check out the FILExt web site. They also list viewers for many of the extensions.) Two of the preferred methods for capturing ArcGIS's images are:

    ArcGIS's Export

    This is the preferred method, which uses the export capabilities of ArcGIS to create a placeable Window's Enhanced Metafile, a gif file, a jpg file, a PDF, etc. Once you have the image created (with all of the elements, such as the legend and scale bar, properly placed) simply use the File / Export menu to save the image as a Windows Enhanced Metafile (*.emf). You can then use a graphics program such as CorelDraw to adjust the image, if necessary, and to save the image in a web-friendly format. Always confirm the Export Options to ensure that the resolution, etc. are what you want them to be. Also, read over the ArcGIS Help file on "exporting, maps" for additional tricks you'll need to know.

    Windows' PRINT SCREEN METHOD

    This method uses the Print Screen key that is located beside the F12 key on the top row of the keyboard. By pressing this key the whole screen is captured as an image to the Clipboard (in the computer's memory). To use this image you can either open Clipboard and save the file as a CLP (clipboard) file or go to a graphic management program and paste the image from the Clipboard into an image file.

    Example:
    Here is a simple walk through of how to use the PRINT SCREEN method to capture an image from ArcGIS.
    1. Open ArcGIS.
    2. Create the screen you wish to capture (can be a layout, table, chart, etc.)
    3. Press Print Screen key on the keyboard.
    4. Open a graphics program.
    5. Select Edit and then Paste, you will see the whole screen capture pasted on the window. Here is a captured screen image.
    6. Now you can edit the image by cropping, resizing, flipping, rotating, adding text and changing colour etc. This is the modified screen image after cropping.

    Graphic Software

    Some of the more popular graphic management programs that handle bitmapped (raster based images) are Corel Photo Paint (available in the Geography Computer Labs) and Paint Shop Pro. Images that are saved as Screen-dumped (*.bmp) files can generally be opened directly from within these types of programs. In addition, the clipboard contents of a screen capture can be pasted directly into these programs. One of the advantages of using a raster-based graphic management program to handle your screen capture is that you can edit and manipulate the image to your liking before saving it, allowing you to crop out window borders, menu headers, and other unnecessary information.

    Vector-based drawing programs such as Illustrator (available in the Departmental Computer Labs) are also useful for manipulating saved images. Bitmapped Screen-Dumps, however, can only be imported into vector-based programs ("Import" is usually found under the "File" menu in most programs). Once the image is imported, a user can add lines, curves, coloured boxes, and artistic text around the image (especially useful when annotating an image in a project!). However, the imported image itself cannot be edited in a drawing program; it must first be manipulated in a raster-based graphic management program.

    Incorporating images to your HTML document may enhance the quality and appeal of your HTML document.

    PROJECT EXAMPLES

    Now that you know how to create HTML documents and incorporate image files in a document, you can produce your GIS project in HTML. Remember that the entire class projects for several years are posted on the web. With the skills and knowledge you acquire in this course, you should be able to produce a project that excels the ones shown here! (Selected examples)

    When you have your HTML files and image files ready, place them in your www directory on Vireo, and send an email to Alejandro or myself indicating where the files reside (that is, your user name). We will then upload the files onto the Departmental server, and make your project available for all to see.