GST 104 - Cartographic Design - FOSS4G Labs

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FOSS4G course curriculum for GST 104 - Cartographic Design.

This curriculum currently contains labs written to use FOSS4G software such as QGIS and Inkscape.

Lab Topics

• Lab 1 - Creating a Colorful Map of the United States of America
• Lab 2 - Exploring Coordinate Systems and Map Projections
• Lab 3 - Map Elements and Design
• Lab 4 - IDP and Refugee Proportional Symbol Map
• Lab 5 - IDP and Refugee Proportional Symbol Map - Designing the Final Map
• Lab 6 - Countries with Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons Over 1 Million Map Design
• Lab 7 - Design and Label a Downtown Street Map

Labs with a checkmark are completely converted to Markdown

Lab Contents

Each Module folder contains a folder designating which version of the QGIS and Inkscape software it is written for (ex. Module 1 Lab\QGIS 2.2\..., Module 4 Lab\QGIS 2.2 Inkscape 0.48\...). The hope is that as new software versions are released, the prior lab's version will be updated and stored in a new (appropriately named) folder.

Each lab contains the following four resources:

• Module n Lab.md - Markdown file of lab
• Module n Lab.docx - MS Word document of the lab
• figures - Folder containing all images reference in the lab
• Lab n Data - Folder containing all data referenced in the lab

Feedback

Open an issue or fork and submit a pull request on github, or, email [email protected].

Curriculum Philosophy

This curriculum was developed to bring a complete set of labs using FOSS4G to the community. As educators, we found the amount of ready-made FOSS4G curriculum lacking, or woefully out of date. Therefore, with the support of the Department of Labor, we decided to create the world's first complete FOSS4G curriculum available for everyone to use, for free.

We do not want this curriculum to die! Therefore, the ICA-OSGeo Lab at Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi is spearheading the continued development and updating of these labs.

License: Creative Commons 3.0 License

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/.F

Curriculum History

FOSS4G Lab Author: Richard Smith, Ph.D.
Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi

Original Lab Content Author: Richard Smith, Ph.D.
Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi

Copyright © National Information Security, Geospatial Technologies Consortium (NISGTC)

The development of these lab documents were funded by the Department of Labor (DOL) Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) Grant No. TC-22525-11-60-A-48; The National Information Security, Geospatial Technologies Consortium (NISGTC) is an entity of Collin College of Texas, Bellevue College of Washington, Bunker Hill Community College of Massachusetts, Del Mar College of Texas, Moraine Valley Community College of Illinois, Rio Salado College of Arizona, and Salt Lake Community College of Utah. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

These documents were modified from their original form by Richard Smith and continues to be modified and improved by generous public contributions.

Curriculum Document Format

All curriculum is written in Markdown. Markdown was chosen for these reasons:

• Markdown is easy to learn and contains enough functionality to render the labs.
• With the lab documents converted to Markdown, GitHub can track all changes to the document; this is not possible with, say, a Word or PDF document.
• It is very easy to convert Markdown to multiple other formats using software such as PanDoc.

Each lab begins with a lab title.

• Course titles are always size Header 1 # GST 10X - Course Title and are the only size Header 1 in the lab document.

The lab number and name is listed next.

• Lab number and titles are always size Header 2 ## Lab n: Lab Title and are the only size Header 2 in the lab document.

An attribution block is next as we always want to give proper attribution.

• This Markdown document contains the attribution block: Attribution Block for Lab Documents.md.

An Introduction, Objective, and Video Statement are listed next.

• These three sections are always size Header 3 ### Introduction and are always sections 1, 2, and 3 respectively.

The lab Tasks (logical blocks of content) are next.

• The Tasks are always size Header 3 ### Task n - Task Title. A lab document contains as many Tasks deemed appropriate by the authors.
• The last Task is always a challenge for the students to attempt on their own without (m)any step-by-step instructions.

The last two sections are Conclusion and Questions.

• These two sections are always size Header 3 ### Conclusion and are always sections 4 and 5 respectively.

When a figure is placed in the lab document, the figure is never provided a number, instead, it is referred to by its relative placement to the referring text (ex. refer to figure below). *All figures should be placed within the 'figures' folder in the same directory as the Markdown document.