LAB 01: WORKFLOW FOUNDATIONS > ASSIGNMENT
DELIVERABLES
Post a PNG or PDF of your QGIS-based or Illustrator-based work-in-progress (WIP) to the Work-in-Progress channel on Are.na, including a short write-up of about 300 words. Follow the formatting guidelines in the syllabus, and the detailed drawing and write-up guidelines below.
Drawing Guidelines
Your drawing simply needs to show that you can complete the workflow, and that you've spent a little time experimenting with graphic composition in QGIS (and, if you are comfortable doing so, Illustrator). You may use whichever colors, lineweights, and other graphic elements as long as you can offer a thoughtful justification for your decisions. Your drawing should:
If you're ready to experiment further, feel free to do so! These guidelines are simply meant to provide a baseline for future workflows, and you are welcome to dive deeper for this assignment if you choose.
Write-up Guidelines
Write-ups should generally offer a short (around 300 words) but critical reflection on your technical and conceptual workflow. This means thinking about your experience with the technical process, design decisions regarding tools used and graphic choices, and a broader, critical consideration of how the exercise connects to themes, genres, and questions of spatial media.
Here are a number of possible prompts to guide your reflections; you do not need to answer them directly, nor do you need to answer each one.
As you work through the tutorial, consider a set of questions regarding your
Consider a further set of questions regarding your
Despite the foundational objectives of this lab, the exercise poses important and recurring conceptual questions. These include (though are certainly not limited to) questions regarding geospatial data and linework.
“Data,” a word borrowed from Latin, literally means “that which is given.” But data always has a complex technical, social, and political history. To get at the “genealogy” of the data, always begin with the basic journalistic “5W+H” questions:
Many of these questions can be partially answered (at least in the most basic factual form) by examining metadata. A well-documented dataset will typically (but not always!) include an .xml file containing its contextual metadata, which can be opened in a plain-text editor (as opposed to a rich-text editor like Microsoft Word or Apple Pages) like Text Edit, Notepad, Sublime Text, or Atom. We will discuss metadata in further depth in coming weeks, but always look for that file; it will usually point you to further documention via a website where the data are hosted, a scientific paper where the data were developed and/or first published, etc. If it’s absent, you should track down where the dataset came from.
Understanding the nature of these datasets opens up further questions into linework. Like data, we will say much more about lines, but most simply, we must always ask of linework: what work does a line do to transform data into geospatial data, and geospatial data into geographic information through which we understand space, place, location, mobility, and other geographic "elementals"?
For this exercise, consider in light of your genealogical interrogation of the data:
For Lab 01, we want you to demonstrate you’re comfortable with the foundational QGIS -> Illustrator workflow outlined in the tutorial.
DELIVERABLES
Drawing Guidelines
Your drawing simply needs to show that you can complete the workflow, and that you've spent a little time experimenting with graphic composition in QGIS (and, if you are comfortable doing so, Illustrator). You may use whichever colors, lineweights, and other graphic elements as long as you can offer a thoughtful justification for your decisions. Your drawing should:
- compositionally approximate the precedent drawing from the Third Coast Atlas
- include stylized geometry from each of the datasets introduced for the lab
- for the rivers, make sure your design decisions are based on scale rank classification
- show that you've experimented with symbology (color, lineweight) and composition in QGIS
If you're ready to experiment further, feel free to do so! These guidelines are simply meant to provide a baseline for future workflows, and you are welcome to dive deeper for this assignment if you choose.
Write-up Guidelines
Write-ups should generally offer a short (around 300 words) but critical reflection on your technical and conceptual workflow. This means thinking about your experience with the technical process, design decisions regarding tools used and graphic choices, and a broader, critical consideration of how the exercise connects to themes, genres, and questions of spatial media.
Here are a number of possible prompts to guide your reflections; you do not need to answer them directly, nor do you need to answer each one.
As you work through the tutorial, consider a set of questions regarding your
technical workflow: - What do you know about the data you're working with? How does that knowledge inform your design decisions regarding symbological manipulation in QGIS (or graphic manipulation in Illustrator)?
- What are the advantages and disadvantages of manipulating your linework symbologically in QGIS?
- Why is it important to export your linework in SVG or PDF?
- Based on your experience in QGIS, what might Illustrator allow you to do differently?
- Are there any "break-downs" in your workflow? If so, what kinds? Are these break-downs traceable to knowledge-based constraints or tool-based constraints?
Consider a further set of questions regarding your
conceptual workflow.Despite the foundational objectives of this lab, the exercise poses important and recurring conceptual questions. These include (though are certainly not limited to) questions regarding geospatial data and linework.
“Data,” a word borrowed from Latin, literally means “that which is given.” But data always has a complex technical, social, and political history. To get at the “genealogy” of the data, always begin with the basic journalistic “5W+H” questions:
- Who made these data, and for whom?
- What exactly do these data represent?
- When was the dataset originally made? Has it been modified, or is it entirely new? How many versions have there been? Are there plans to update it?
- What geographic extents (where) does the data cover, and how are those extents determined?
- Why were these data made, and with what purposes and users in mind?
- How are the data made in the first place? How are those representations geometrically and graphically constructed from the data? How are they classified, and what are the bases for those classifications?
Many of these questions can be partially answered (at least in the most basic factual form) by examining metadata. A well-documented dataset will typically (but not always!) include an .xml file containing its contextual metadata, which can be opened in a plain-text editor (as opposed to a rich-text editor like Microsoft Word or Apple Pages) like Text Edit, Notepad, Sublime Text, or Atom. We will discuss metadata in further depth in coming weeks, but always look for that file; it will usually point you to further documention via a website where the data are hosted, a scientific paper where the data were developed and/or first published, etc. If it’s absent, you should track down where the dataset came from.
Understanding the nature of these datasets opens up further questions into linework. Like data, we will say much more about lines, but most simply, we must always ask of linework: what work does a line do to transform data into geospatial data, and geospatial data into geographic information through which we understand space, place, location, mobility, and other geographic "elementals"?
For this exercise, consider in light of your genealogical interrogation of the data:
- For these particular datasets, why are rivers represented as lines rather than polygons? What difference does that make to understanding a river as a geographic (rather than merely geometric) entity?
- How (or perhaps more precisely, when) are polygonal boundaries of, for instance, a lake edge or a continental shoreline determined? What does this say about convetional representations of the edge between land and water?
- What do the geometries of rivers and lakes (as represented in these datasets) suggest about their geographies? (Consider in particular the geographic dynamism of water bodies.)
- What geographic patterns emerge through different symbological choices? At which scale(s)?
- What does the continental and/or basin-scale representation of water systems suggest about different ways to imagine territory or regions?
- How might different representations of water as a dynamic element reveal alternative "hydrographies" beyond well-delineated bodies of water? What kinds of lines might do that work?