Week 2: Own Your Map

Own Your Map: UWF Campus Location in Escambia County

This week's lab focused on making a basic map in ArcGIS.  After resizing a large map of Florida to make it an insert map,  I added data to create a full size map showing the location of the UWF Campus within Escambia County.  Interstate highways and rivers were added, and I fine tuned the map by clipping the data frame so the rivers and roads displayed correctly within the shape of the county.  I edited symbols for the campus location, the interstate and the rivers, and changed the fill color of the county.  Then I added and edited essential elements: a title, legend, north arrow, scale, cartographer's information, map creation date, and data source.  The map was exported as a jpeg.

Something I haven't figured out yet is why the top part of the frame doesn't show up in the jpeg version.  Also, my filepaths are not as short as in the example from the Process Summary template, so I must be importing my data from the R: drive incorrectly.  It worked, but I ended up with an output folder of S:\csewall/IntroArcGIS\Lab2\02_OwnYourMap\02_OwnYourMap instead of having it neatly in the Lab2 folder I created.  When I tried to move all the data from the "OwnYourMap"folder into the Lab2 folder, the Escambia County map layer wasn't on the page.

The learning curve remains steep, but I feel like I'm making progress despite the obstacles and the few things that remain not quite right.