Jennifer's GIS Blog

 Hi - I joined the GIS program in the fall of 2024 to formalize my GIS training, following more than a decade of independent learning with GIS. I'm an Archaeologist with my BA and MA in Anthropology, and have worked for the UWF Archaeology Institute as a research associate since 2015. In the past few years, I have become actively involved in cemetery preservation and research. You can learn more about this on my  story map . Ultimately, I am hoping to add GISP to my credentials list. I'm currently working on an article examing several vernacular markers in Pensacola's cemeteries. Resetting a marker in AME Zion Cemetery Exploring Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta with the Association for Gravestone Studies Conference.

For module 6, we learned how to work with search cursors to pull geometric information from a shapefile. This required the creation of nested for loops, however this wasn't without issues due to the instruction to close the file and cursor. This required moving on from for loops to using a try/ finally construction rather than the code as demonstrated in the textbook which used a with along with the nested for loops, the with architecture automatically closes the cursor & file when all the for loop criteria have been met.   Overall, this week's exercise seemed easier than that of the previous week, perhaps because I was already familiar with the tuple call which gave me some difficulty in module 5.

For this week we had to work with creating a new fGDB and then listing the feature classes to be copied to the new geodatabase using Python, each shapefile is then copied to the geodatabase  After iterating through each geodatabase a search cursor is initiated in order to produce the county seats within the cities shapefile along with their population Finally, a new dictionary called county seats is created and each of the county seats and their population is fed into the new dictionary and the new dictionary is printed

  For week 4, we moved from learning the basics of how Python functions to using it within the ArcPro ecosystem. We learned how to use modelbuilder and how to write code necessary to complete basic geoprocessing steps like buffers and clips.  For our results we included printed comments in order for it to be possible to see what code was executing when. 1         To create the xy coordinates, I pulled from the demo code on the Add XY coordinates help page, changing variables as necessary, and adding the print GetMessages function 2         To create the buffer, I first tried using the demo code available from ESRI help, but ran into it trying to do more steps than I wanted, so I built what I wanted in model builder and sent it to the python window and used that to create the code I needed, modifying names & code as necessary 3         I returned to my model builder to h...