weeknotes: GIS 101

So I’ve decided to give weeknotes a go.

What are weeknotes?

At the most basic level they are posts on someone’s blog that generally appear each week. What about a level up from that? Well, they tend to contain some account of what the author of the post got up to in the last week. That might take the form of a detailed list of activities, such as events attended, work completed, or personal endeavours enjoyed. It might also be more reflective, a form of journaling, how things in the last week made one feel. Indeed a weeknote could be a mixture of those things, and more, or less. They are whatever the author makes of them.

I’m going to give them a go, at least for a little while, as a way to encourage myself to write about what I’m getting up with regards to exploring the world of GIS.

I recently solidified my interest in GIS by enthusiastically completing Introduction to Mapping, Spatial Data and GIS, an online course from University of Oxford. I’m now following that up with my own “GIS curriculum” that I’ve been putting together in the last few weeks. Next in line I have a course from Pennsylvania State University called Spatial Database Management.

The Pennsylvania State University course differs from the University of Oxford course in that it is open-access, so I can freely browse and work my way through the course materials at my leisure, outside of any official class enrolment. However that does mean I won’t have any discussion forums to participate in while I work through it, so in lieu of that I shall blog into the void with weeknotes. And other posts. That’s the theory at least.

As for what else my GIS curriculum entails, I will get into that in the coming weeks. The gist of it is:

• database stuff
• spatial analysis stuff
• cartography stuff

Not in that explicit order necessarily, though I am starting off with some database stuff.