Title Card: Creator: Parisa Setayesh | Level: Beginner–Intermediate | Category: Data: Data, Space and Place Why this mattersNYC Open Data is remarkably direct about documentation: data dictionaries should be a key resource, and the primer page contains information such as update date and field definitions. Their metadata guidance also emphasizes making documentation more usable and…

Title Card: Creator: Parisa Setayesh | Level: Beginner–Intermediate | Category: Data: Data, Space and Place Why this mattersA huge amount of mapping depends on joining a non-spatial table to a spatial layer. The Census Bureau explicitly notes that TIGER/Line shapefiles contain geographic entity codes, or GEOIDs, that can be linked to Census demographic data. QGIS’s…

Title Card: Creator: Parisa Setayesh | Level: Beginner–Intermediate | Category: Data: Data, Space and Place Why this mattersA coordinate reference system defines how a projected map in GIS relates to real places on Earth, and QGIS’s introductory documentation makes clear that projection choice always involves tradeoffs because no map projection preserves all properties perfectly. QGIS…

Title Card: Creator: Parisa Setayesh | Level: Beginner | Category: Data: Data, Space and Place Why this mattersMessy data is one of the fastest ways to make mapping feel impossible. GCDI’s How to Organize Data for Maps signals this very clearly with its example of a basic spreadsheet in which each sample is a feature…

Title Card: Creator: Parisa Setayesh | Level: Beginner | Category: Data: Data, Space and Place Why this mattersA lot of mapping becomes less mysterious once learners understand the basic data models. QGIS’s introductory documentation explains that vector data represents real-world features as points, lines, and polygons, while raster data represents space as a grid of…

Title Card: Creator: Parisa Setayesh | Level: Beginner | Category: Data: Data, Space and Place Why this mattersMost beginner mapping problems start before the map is made. NYC Open Data explicitly frames itself as free public data published by New York City agencies and points new users to its “How To” materials; those materials also…