Assignment 1: Introductory material

The first part of the course was designed to introduce some of the foundations of geographic thought, core technical details of working with spatial data, and introduce R as a tool for end-to-end spatial workflows. This homework is meant to help reinforce those concepts and identify any gaps that I need to fill in as we go. There are additional step-by-step guides in the By the end of this assignment you should be able to:

Instructions

  1. After you’ve joined the assignment repository, you should have this file (named Readme.md) inside of a R project named assignment-1-xx where xx is your github username (or initials).

  2. Once you’ve verified that you’ve correctly cloned the assignment repository, create a new Quarto document. Name this file assignment-1-xxx.qmd and give it a title (like M Williamson Assignment 1). Make sure that you select the html output option (Quarto can do a lot of cool things, but the html format is the least-likely to cause you additional headaches). We’ll be using Quarto throughout the course so it’s worth checking out the other tutorials in the getting started section.

  3. Copy the questions below into your document and change the color of their text.

  4. Save the changes and make your first commit!

  5. Answer the questions making sure save and commit at least 2 more times (having 3 commits is part of the assignment).

  6. Render the document to html (you should now have at least 3 files in the repository: Readme.md, assignment-1-xx.qmd, and assignment-1-xx.html). Commit these changes and push them to the repository on GitHub. You should see the files there when you go to github.com.

Questions for the Assignment

  1. How does geographic analysis fit into your goals for your research? Given our discussion of the aims and limitations of geographic analysis, are there particular issues that you would like to know more about or guard against?

  2. What are the primary components that describe spatial data?

  3. What is the coordinate reference system and why is it important

  4. Find two maps of the same area in different projections? How does the projection affect your perception of the data being displayed?

  5. Read in the cejst.shp file in the assignment01 folder. How many attributes describe each object? How many unique geometries are there? What is the coordinate reference system?

Note

Solutions are here