What do we mean, exactly, when we talk humanities data?
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This lab walks through the process of creating a basic map using ArcGIS Pro and data from the Ancient World Mapping Center (AWMC). It is broken into five sections:
answers to the questions in green boxes, compiled and submitted in a .doc, .odf, or .pdf file
Preparing your workspace
Before starting a mapping project, you must set up a workspace. By “workspace,” I mean a dedicated folder on your computer where you’ll store your project files. Creating a sensible workspace structure is a love letter to your future self. By the end of the term, you will have downloaded many gigabytes of spatial data, created at least a dozen ArcGIS Pro projects, and produced hundreds—maybe even thousands—of derivative spatial data files. Practicing disciplined file organization from the start is an important part of setting yourself up for success in this course (and in any situation where you’re working with lots of files).
Choosing a workspace location
In the context of this class, there are three places where you might choose to set up your workspace:
your personal H: Drive—recommended
your Tufts Box account—not recommended
a personal thumb drive
a location on your computer’s hard drive—only if you are using a personal computer
This lab assumes—as will all activities, labs, and assignments for this course—that you are working from a computer in the Tufts Data Lab and that you are saving and storing project files to your Tufts H: Drive.
The H: Drive is recommended because it provides easily accessible, stable cloud storage that is automatically present on all Data Lab computers and can be configured for your personal computers as well. That doesn’t mean you must use the H: Drive. You should choose a workspace location that makes the most sense for your situation—but if you pick one of the other methods, just make a mental note that some instructions in this lab may look different.
If you plan to use the H: drive on a personal computer, you have to manually connect to it.
Go ahead and create a folder called geospatial-humanities. You can do this by clicking “New” > “Folder”, or right-clicking in the empty space and choosing “New Folder.”
Then, click into the geospatial-humanities folder and make another folder called lab01-manual.
Finally, inside of that folder, create three folders: downloaded-data, working-maps, and for-submission. You’ll save all data files to the downloaded-data folder; you’ll store your ArcGIS Pro project files in the working-maps folder; and you’ll put all your exported final maps—as well as any other graded content—in the for-submission folder.
Workspace folder structure
Now, in the Search Bar at the bottom of your desktop screen, type “ArcGIS Pro” and double-click the application to open it.
Click Map.
When it’s open, you should see something like this:
The landing page for ArcGIS Pro
Click Map.
When the dialog box appears, uncheck “Create a folder for this project” and then click the yellow folder icon:
Creating a new project
A window titled “New Project Location” will appear. Navigate to the workspace you just made, click on the working-maps folder—not into it—and then click OK:
Note that the default save location is the C: drive. If you keep your work here, it will not be saved, as the C: drive of Data Lab computers is wiped every night.
When you’ve done this, the “Location” of your new project should update to something like H:\geospatial-humanities\lab01-manual\working-maps.
Click OK again.
ArcGIS Pro will start to boot up. It might think for a minute or two as part of its sundry geospatial ablutions (“Creating geoprocessing cache…”). When it’s done, you’ll see this:
The ArcGIS Pro application
By default, ArcGIS Pro projects load two “base map” layers: the World Topographic Map and the World Hillshade. You don’t have to keep these on, but they can be a helpful reference as you orient yourself to the application. As a reference for these two default layers:
A topographic map is a kind of reference map displaying qualitative features like place names alongside quantitative features like elevation (usually in contour lines)
A hillshade is a cartographic technique that uses elevation data to simulate the effects of the sun (e.g., shadows) in a 2-D map
Open your workspace by clicking Windows File Explorer and navigate to your working-maps folder. Now, a bunch of files and folders should appear:
You must not delete, change location of, futz with, or otherwise disturb these files. They are required for your ArcGIS project to function. The exception is the file lab01.aprx, which is your ArcGIS Project file. You can double-click this to open your project… but that’s it!
Option B: Let ArcGIS Pro set up your workspace
Alternatively, you can let ArcGIS Pro set up your workspace for you. The upside of this is that it’s easier; the downside is that the workspace it produces is not as configurable. It can be harder to extract the contents of your project for use in a software environment other than ArcGIS Pro.
In the ArcGIS Pro application, click Project > New > Map. The “New Project” dialog box will appear again.
Name your project lab01-automatic. Make sure the box that says “Create a folder for this project” is checked.
Click the yellow folder icon to “Browse” your File Explorer.
Navigate to your H: drive and click on the geospatial-humanities folder…
… and click OK. Now the location of your new project should read H:\geospatial-humanities.
Click OK again. After a little bit of thinking, you should see a new ArcGIS Pro.
Open Windows File Explorer again and take a look at your geospatial-humanities directory. You should now have two folders—one called lab01-manual and one called lab01-automatic—each containing different project files.
Now that you’ve set up your workspaces, pick one of them to actually continue working in for the rest of the lab. The rest of this tutorial will assume you are using the lab01-manual workspace.
Why is defining a workspace important for geospatial projects? In this class, what are three possible locations where you can set up a workspace?
Downloading your data
The map you’ll make in this lab is a general purpose reference map, or a map that displays features of interest to your desired audience. In this case, we’re imagining an audience who is interested in the geography of the ancient world. Your reference map of features in the ancient world will use data provided by the Ancient World Mapping Center (AWMC).
GitHub is a popular web application for version control. It’s used by digital humanities scholars, computer programmers, and much more. Check out Dan Shiffman’s videos about GitHub if you want to learn how it works.
The Geodata Repository is basically an annotated file directory. On the home page, AWMC provides some context for the file formats in which they publish their data: GeoJSON (.geojson) and shapefile (.shp). These are two of most common spatial data file formats that you will encounter in this class, and we’ll talk a lot more about them in Week 4. For now, suffice to say that each format provides a different approach to encoding features about the world as one of three geometries: points, lines, and polygons. Shapefiles are a proprietary format developed and maintained by Esri, the makers of ArcGIS software. GeoJSON is an open-source spatial data format.
Because ArcGIS Pro does not provide inherent support the GeoJSON format (🙄), we are going to download the shapfile folders. Click on the file Cultural Shapefiles for Apr 2024.zip. This is a “zipped” or compressed folder. To initiate the download, click the download icon at the upper-right hand side of the new page:
The file should end up in the Downloads folder of your C: Drive (This PC > Users > yourUserName > Downloads). Locate it, and then move it into the downloaded-data folder in your workspace.
I recommend opening two Windows File Explorer windows and manually dragging the zipped file from Downloads to downloaded-data, like so:
Unzip the data by right-clicking on the file Cultural Shapefiles for Apr 2024.zip > Extract all.... Double-check that the folder where files will be extracted resembles…
… then, click Extract. It may take a minute or two, but when the extraction is complete, you should see a new “unzipped” folder containing folders like aqueducts, dams, mines_quarries, and more.
Repeat steps 3-5 for the folder Physical Shapefiles for Apr 2024.zip.
When you are done, you should have 4 folders in your downloaded-data directory: 2 zipped files containing cultural and physical shapefiles, and 2 extracted or “unzipped” folders containing the same.
What are the two geospatial data formats that you downloaded?
Understanding your interface
The ArcGIS Pro interface is pretty complex. It could take you a while to wrap your head around it. Here’s the basic idea:
Project tab: Provides access to application settings and other configurable properties
The Ribbon: Organizes commands on a series of tabs, like “Map”, “Insert”, “Analyze”, and more
Command Search box: Helps you find and open geoprocessing tools
Contents pane: Displays all layers in the current project
Map view: Your window into visualizing and editing spatial data
Catalog pane: A simulation of your Windows File Explorer, but with geospatial functionality
The ArcGIS Pro application (image adapted from Esri docs)
Let’s take a tour through these components.
Project tab
Click the Project tab. Your ArcGIS Pro project should momentarily disappear, hidden by a list of application settings.
In this tab, you can do standard things like “Save Project” and “Save Project As”, but you can also click the “Options” button to fiddle with a variety of settings in your project environment.
Don’t mess with any of it right now, but you may choose to customize some of these settings once you get a handle on the software.
If you hover your cursor over almost anything in ArcGIS Pro and let it linger for a second, the name of the tool and a short description of it will appear.
The Ribbon
Close the “Options” window and click the back arrow at the top-left hand corner of the screen to return to your project. The horizontal gallery of buttons stretching across the top of your application window is the Ribbon:
The ribbon in ArcGIS Pro
Each tab in the Ribbon provides access to a variety of different groups, each of which contains tools for interacting with spatial data. For example, the Map tab, which should be active by default, contains a Navigation group with features that allow you to pan, zoon, and create bookmarks around your project:
Try a couple of them out:
Make sure the “Explore” button is active
Click on the map and drag around
Scroll in and out of the map
Now try zooming into Alexandria, Egypt (along the northern coast)
Once you’re there, click Bookmarks > New Bookmark...:
The bookmark tool in the Navigation group of the Map tab
Name it “Alexandria” and click OK.
Now, in the Navigation group, click the Previous Extent button a few times. This button looks like a back arrow:
Click it until you’re pretty far away from Alexandria. As named, this button returns you to the previous extent of the Map view. It’s particularly useful if you ever get “lost” in your map, like scrolling too deep in or out.
Once you’ve scooted yourself sufficiently far from Alexandria, click the Bookmarks button again. Now, you should see a little card that says “Alexandria.” Click it to instantly return there.
Other features in the Ribbon will become more useful when you add data to the project. There are a few ways to add data, and one of them is in the Ribbon itself, in the Layer group of the Map tab:
Click the “Add Data” button (). It will open a new “Add Data” window.
Navigate to the folder where you saved your spatial data (it should be in something like Folders > gisusers$ (H:) > geospatial-humanities > lab01_manual > downloaded-data)
Click into Cultural Shapefiles Apr 2024 > political_shading > roman_empire_ad_14_extent
In that folder, you should see one file: roman_empire_ad_14_extent.shp. Select it and click OK to add it to the project.
When the data is added, your Map view should automatically reset to the data’s extent. In this case, you are looking at the extent of the Roman Empire in the year CE (AD) 14:
Nice! You’ve just added your first spatial data layer to an geospatial project. But what can you actually do with it?
With the “Explore” tool active, click on one of the spatial data features in the Map view. You can always use the “Explore” tool to quickly inspect the characteristics of a spatial data feature. When clicked, a pop-up window should appear:
The pop-up window displays this feature’s attributes, including fields like AREA, PERIMETER, NEWDIO_, and more. It’s not immediately clear what some of these fields actually mean (like NEWDIO_), and even in cases where you can tell what a field means (like AREA), the units of measurement may not be clear. This is a common experience when working with spatial data.
Now, in the Selection group of the Map tab, click “Select.”
Try selecting a few features from the Map view. You can click on features individually; hold down shift+click to select multiple features; or drag a box to select by area.
Once your features are selected, click the “Attributes” button in the Selection group. A new Attributes pane will appear in the same spot as the Catalog pane.
Click through different features in the layer roman_empire_ad_14_extent—each one is identified by a numerical ID—to reveal their attributes:
Finally, if you right-click on any of the features in the Attributes pane, you’ll see more options for interacting with the features. Select a feature and click “Zoom To”:
It will instantly zoom you to that feature in the Map view. When you’re done inspecting the feature, click the “Previous Extent” button to return to your view of the full data layer.
Using the “Select” tool and the Attributes pane, what is the area and perimeter of feature 7, feature 50, and feature 113?
(Make sure to click the “Clear” button in the Selection group when you’re done; this will get rid of those blue lines in your Map view.)
Catalog pane
When you opened the Attributes pane, the Catalog pane may have mysteriously disappeared. If it did, you can reopen it by clicking on the “Catalog” tab at the bottom right-hand side of the application:
This is a good moment to observe that the whole ArcGIS Pro project interface is visually reconfigurable. Try clicking the thumbtack button at the top right-hand corner of the Catalog pane:
Both your Catalog and Attributes panes should collapse onto the sidebar. You can also click the little v-shaped button to its left to “float” the pane, and if you prefer your panes to be docked in a different part of the screen, you can click and hold that top bar to reorganize them. If you want to dispose of a pane altogether, you can close it by clicking the ｘ.
If you ever close a pane (perhaps by accident) and you need to find it again, open the View tab and look at the “Windows” group. It has a variety of options for restoring panes.
The “Windows” group in the View tab
But let’s return to the Catalog itself.
The Catalog essentially functions as a view into your computer’s files. You can use it to navigate and traverse file directories in the same way you would use Windows File Explorer. This means you can use it to add data to the project:
In the Folders directory of the Catalog pane, navigate to your data (if you don’t see your H: drive, you may need to right-click on Folders > Add Folder Connection and find your H: drive)
Click into Cultural Shapfiles > political_shading
Load the following spatial data by dragging the extent shapefile from its folder in Catalog and releasing it in the Map view:
roman_empire_ad_69_extent
roman_empire_ad_117_extent
roman_empire_ad_200_extent
As you drag and drop each of these files into the map, notice how they cascade into the Contents pane.
Once you’ve done so, the project should resemble:
This “drag and drop” method can be a little quicker than the “point and click” method that you used by clicking the “Add Data” button in the Ribbon.
The Catalog pane, in addition to providing a view into the files on your computer via the “Folders” tab, also provides options for you to view “Maps” and “Databases”.
You can use the Catalog to interact with maps inside your ArcGIS Pro Project. First, unfold the “Maps” tab, and you’ll see an object titled “Map.” Right-click it, choose “Rename,” and give it a new name—maybe something like “Reference map.” (You can also rename a file by clicking it once while it’s already highlighted, just like most other file explorer applications.)
Now, right-click on “Maps” and choose “New map.” This will create a new, empty map view, titled “Map” by default. You can rename this one too, if you want. You should now see something like this, with two tabs in your Map pane corresponding to two map objects in your Catalog pane:
You can also use the Catalog to interact with your project’s geodatabase.
Since my project is named lab01, you should see a geodatabase named lab01 under “Databases” in the Catalog pane:
A geodatabase can store various types of geographic datasets. You can import the shapefiles you’ve loaded in your project as “Feature classes” in the lab01 geodatabase.
To do so, right-click lab01 > Import > Feature Class(es). This will open a tool called “Feature Class To Geodatabase.” From the “Input Features” drop-down menu, select the four data layers you’re already loaded into your map:
Then, click “Run.” A little green bar will appear at the bottom of the screen letting you know when the tool has finished running.
When it’s done, click the “Back” button at the top left-hand corner of the tool panel. This will return you to a Catalog pane and geodatabase that contains four new “Feature Classes,” each bearing the same name as the layers in your map:
Currently, the feature class inside your geodatabase is a separate file from the layers in your map. Let’s confirm this by examining their file paths, or the strings of text that specify where these files are stored on your computer.
On the layer roman_empire_ad_14_extent in your Contents pane, right-click > “Properties” > “Source”. What is the data type and file path of the layer roman_empire_ad_14_extent in your Contents pane?
Now, on the similarly-named feature in the Catalog pane, right-click > “Properties” > “Source”. What is its data type and file path?
When you work with spatial data files in a software like ArcGIS Pro, it’s important to remember that your project—the lab01.aprx file in which you’re currently working—doesn’t save “data” directly to the project. All of the geographic features that you create, edit, and analyze are representations of other data objects saved in various places, such as:
the Downloads folder on your C: drive (very bad, never do this)
a specified data folder in the project workspace of your H: drive (much better, nice!)
a gdb associated with your current ArcGIS Pro project (much better, nice!)
The Catalog pane gives you one view into the inner workings of your .aprx file. In this sense, a standard ArcGIS Pro project structure kind of resembles that meme of Charlie from It’s Always Sunny standing in front of the conspiracy board. An .aprx is a big, complicated pile of fragile file paths—and if you move any of the actual files themselves, the .aprx will break.
charlie
Contents pane
You’ve interacted with the Contents pane on the left-hand side of your project interface a lot already.
You can use it to perform basic spatial data organization tasks like…
changing the render order of layers by clicking and dragging
toggling layers on and off by clicking the checked box
renaming layers by right-clicking > Rename
Try each of these. Drag the layers around so that they are ordered differently. Toggle some layers on and off by checking the box. Rename a layer or two.
You can also use the Contents pane to access, examine, and edit critical layer properties like…
a layer’s attribute table
a layer’s symbology
a layer’s metadata
Right now, the Contents pane lists all of the data layers that you’ve added to your project. This should include four layers showing the historical extent of Roman Empire at four different years.
Let’s add a few more.
Using the Catalog pane, go ahead and add the four layers from lab01.gdb to the map as well. You can do so by dragging and dropping them into the Map view, or right-click > “Add to Current Map”.
Now 10 layers should appear in your map:
Your base map layers, World Topographic Map and Hillshade
Two layers each of Roman Empire extent at various years
At the top of the Contents pane—that is, below the “Search” bar and above the “Drawing Order” label—you should see several icons in a horizontal row. When clicked, each of them allows you to filter layers in the Contents pane by different parameters.
Click the cylinder (if you hover your cursor over it, it’ll read “List By Data Source”).
List layers in contents pane by their data source
Once clicked, the organization of the layers in your Contents pane will change. If you drag the Contents pane so that it’s a little wider—and collapse all entries so that only the data source is showing—you should see something like this:
List layers in contents pane by their data source
There are two important takeaways to glean from sorting the layers in this way.
First, the four layers in your lab01.gdb—or more appropriately, the feature classes—all share the same source; that is, lab01.gdb
Second, the four layers from your downloaded-data folder—or more appropriately, the shapefiles—all share a different source; that is, their parent folder
Third, the two base map layers have sources that resemble URL structures, e.g., beginning with https://. These data layers are stored on Esri “cloud” servers and delivered via two file transfer services, respectively called content delivery networks and REST services, and you don’t need to know how these work but it’s good to know that they exist
It matters a lot that these data layers have different sources. That I’m asking you to recognize their difference might feel pedantic, but it’s actually pretty critical to keeping your projects and workflows organized.
When you’re working on mapping projects, you must always understand where your data layers are sourced. If you don’t know this, you could make huge mistakes that waste you lots of time, progress, and even money.
Of course, we don’t need two of every Roman Empire extent layer in our working map, so let’s cut out one of the groups. The layers in the downloaded-datashould be reserved as clean copies of the original dataset; following that logic, we can remove them following this simple workflow.
Click the top layer in the “stack” of layers sourced from downloaded-data
While holding down the shift key, select the bottom layer in the stack (this will select all the layers in between as well)
List layers in contents pane by their data source
On any of the layers you just selected, right-click > “Remove”
Your layers should disappear from the Contents pane.
Toggle the filter of your Contents pane back to “List By Drawing Order” (the icon directly to the left of the “List By Source” cylinder)
Before proceeding to the next section, simplify your four data layer names. For each layer, right-click > “Rename” (or click the layer when it’s already selected) and give it a simpler name, e.g., roman_empire_ad_14_extent > re_14
Map view
The Map view is where the magic happens: this view, in the center of your project interface, displays the position of your spatial data layers on a dynamic coordinate system. You can interact with the map, and its contents, by using different commands in the “Map” tab that we discussed above (such as “Add Data” or “Explore”).
Two of the most important features displayed in the Map view are actually accessed through the Contents pane: attributes, or the descriptive information associated with geographic features, and symbology, or the cartographic choices associated with attributes. Let’s look at each of them in turn.
Attributes
Earlier, I mentioned the “attribute table.” This is one of the most important features of any geographic information system. The attribute table ties geographic features to descriptive information, allowing you to connect qualitative and quantitative observations about the world with their real-life locations. Thanks, attribute table!
You can open the attribute table by interacting with layers in the Contents pane. The attribute table itself will open in the Map view.
The Attribute Table displays all of the qualitative and quantitative information associated with a given layer. To open it, you can right-click a layer > “Attribute Table” or click on a layer and press ctrl+T.
Open the attribute table for the layer re_200. Make sure it’s sorted at the top of your “stack” of layers.
You should see something like this:
The attribute table
The attribute table stores important qualitative and quantitative details about the geometric features represented on the map. Each feature in the map corresponds to a row in the attribute table. Let me say that again: each feature in the map corresponds to a row in the attribute table. Very important to recognize this!
In the attribute table, columns are called “fields” or “attributes,” while rows are called “records” or “features.”
You can “Select” a record by clicking the record number, or the leftmost cell in the row (the one to the left of the OBJECTID_1 column).
Select the record with an OBJECTID_1 value of 1. It should be at the very top of your attribute table. If it isn’t, you can double-click on OBJECTID_1 and toggle the sort order of the attribute table (e.g., between low-to-high and high-to-low).
Note that there are two fields with similar names in this attribute table: OBJECTID_1 and OBJECTID. Looks kind of weird, right? For 3.75 points of extra credit (5% of your grade on this lab), explain in no more than 2 sentences why this happened. (To accomplish this, you may have to do some snooping; e.g., compare the attribute table of your lab01.gdb feature classes against those of your downloaded-data shapefiles.)
Selecting a cell will highlight the whole row, as well as the corresponding geographic feature on the Map view, in light blue.
However, depending on the scale and region of your Map view, it may be hard to see the row that you’ve selected in the Map view.
You can right-click on the row number to zoom to a specific feature; that is, right-click > “Zoom To”, or the keystroke ctrl+=.
Try zooming to the feature with a an OBJECTID_1 value of 1 (you can also zoom to a feature by double-clicking the record number). Your screen should resemble:
Zoomed-in view of a selected feature
Use the attribute table to determine the following for the layer re_200:
In total, how many features does the attribute table contain?
What is the OBJECTID value of the feature with the largest area?
What is the name of the feature with an OBJECTID_1 value of 1? Since there’s no attribute for “Feature name,” you may have to toggle your layers on and off.
If this feels like a familiar process, that’s because, it is! You did something similar to this already when answering Question 3. In the section of this lab on the Ribbon, you used the “Selection” group of the Map tab to query and filter attribute data:
The selection group in the “Map” tab of the Ribbon
When you’re using ArcGIS Pro—and really, when you’re doing any geospatial project, whether using this software or not—there are almost always multiple ways to answer the same question.
Before proceeding to the next section:
Right-click on any of the layers in your Contents pane and choose “Zoom to Layer.” This will snap your Map view to that data layer’s geographic extent.
In the “Selection” group of the Map tab, click “Clear”
Symbology
In ArcGIS Pro, symbology entails all aspects of cartographic representation. The color of a polygon, the thickness of a line, and the icon used for a point are all determined in the “Symbology” tab of a layer’s properties.
To access a layer’s symbology, simply right-click > “Symbology”. Try it out on the layer re_14 (just make sure that layer is at the top of the “stack” in your Contents pane).
A new Symbology window should replace your Catalog pane:
The attribute table
Click the color swatch next to the word “Symbol”:
Choose a new color for the feature.
First, click a design from the “Gallery” of preset colors. These come off the shelf of ArcGIS Pro. When you click one of the options, the feature will automatically update in the Map view.
Next, click the “Properties” tab and try defining your own color, outline, and outline width. When you’ve made your choices, you need to click “Apply” to apply them to the Map view. Then, click the <- arrow to return to the main Symbology pane.
You can also symbolize features based on attributes in the attribute table. Click the drop-down bar under the “Primary Symbology” header and select “Graduated Colors”. This will automatically redraw your re_14 layer, likely using the OBJECTID_1 field. You should see something like this:
The OBJECTID_1 field isn’t very useful to symbolize. Because it’s just an metadata value, it doesn’t show us meaningful data or spatial patterns. Unforunately, there aren’t many meaningful fields baked into the re_14 layer, but go ahead and try setting the value of “Field” to AREA. Feel free to play around with the “Color scheme” as well.
Now choose the “Select” tool from the Map tab.
Open the attribute table for re_14. If you never closed your attribute table for re_200, you’ll see this second one appear in a new tab. Click the “Show Selected Records” button as indicated in the screenshot below:
This view of the attribute table allows you to view only records that are currently selected in the Map view. Try selecting a few features and you’ll see that the view of the attribute table dynamically populated based on what you’ve selected:
Try selecting the 3 features that overlap modern-day Tunisia, Algiers, Spain, and France. You’ll have to hold down the shift key while you’re clicking each one.
Now, in the attribute table, right-click the AREA header and select “Summarize”. This will open the handy Summary Statistics tool, which you can use to calculate summary statistics for fields in an attribute table.
Complete the form so that it resembles the following, and then click “OK”:
Once the tool has finished running, a new table titled re_14_Statistics should appear under a new header called “Standalone tables” in your Contents pane.
Right-click in the Area column of the table and select “Visualize Statistics”.
A chart titled Distribution of AREA should appear under a header called “Charts” in your Contents pane. Double-click on the Distribution of AREA layer, and a chart should appear on the right-hand side of your screen:
Examine the “Statistics” section of the “Chart Properties” for re_14. What is the sum of:
the whole dataset?
your selection?
Once you’ve answered this question, you can:
Remove the Distribution of AREA layer from the Contents pane
Close out of the “Chart Properties” dialog box
Click the Map tab in the Ribbon to return to a more familiar interface
Command search box
If you ever get lost searching for something in ArcGIS Pro—e.g., any of the many things that have been discussed so far in this lab—try typing it out in the Command Search Box at the top of the screen, just to the right your .aprx file name:
The command search box
Making your map
Although this was far from an exhaustive tour of the ArcGIS Pro interface, it’s given you a basic overview of how to:
Organize your project and project files using Windows File Explorer and the Catalog pane
Interact with ArcGIS Pro’s interface
Load and remove spatial data layers using things like the Catalog and Contents pane
Query and filter spatial data attributes using the “attribute table”
Basic symbolization via the Symbology pane
Believe it or not, this is enough for you to make a basic map! So go forth and do that.
You’ve downloaded a bunch of data from the Ancient World Mapping Center. (AWMC) Right now, it’s saved in your downloaded-data folder.
To finish this lab, add at least 5 more AWMC data layers to your project, not including one of the Roman Empire extent layers. Try to use a combination of data from the Physical Shapefiles folder and the Cultural Shapefiles folder.
Specifications
Your final map should include, at minimum: * 1 of the Roman Empire extent layers * 5 additional physical and cultural layers * Some kind of symbology applied to all your layers * All layers must be clearly visible at the scale of your exported map
Most importantly, your map: * Does not need to look pretty or fancy! * This is an exercise in working with ArcGIS Pro and spatial data—NOT an exercise in cartographic design
A few tips: * If you load a dataset but can’t determine its geographic extent, try right-clicking on the layer and selecting “Zoom To Layer” * IMPORTANT: To export your map as a png file, click the “Share” tab of the Ribbon, Click “Export Map”, select PNG as the “File Type”, choose a suitable file path for export, and click “OK”
Example map
Here is a sample map containing 6 layers: 1. the Roman Empire extent in 14 AD 2. inland water 3. urban footprint 4. forts 5. mines & quarries 6. rivers
). It will open a new “Add Data” window.
