Welcome to the Blog!

The one where I explain things ….

Hi, thanks for checking out my blog! You’re probably wondering why I suddenly have a website and blog in the first place, right? Let me explain ….

If you got this far on the site you probably know that I have been learning GIS, or Geographic Information Systems, for the past several months. I have been doing this through the online learning platform Coursera, and specifically the GIS Specialization (their term for a series of related courses) offered by the University of California at Davis (if you’re reading this, Hi Nick!). This is a five-course specialization, with the first four courses covering fundamental aspects of GIS. You will find some of the maps I have worked on during these four courses in the ‘Past Projects’ section of the site. The fifth and final course in the specialization is a longer, more independent project; where all the skills learned in the preceding courses are pulled together to conduct a full geospatial analysis project of our own choosing.

That is where this site comes in. I am creating it at the start of that fifth and final course. If you are reading this in April or May 2020 (and let’s be honest, you’re stuck inside thanks to the Coronavirus so you’ve likely nothing better to do!) you can follow along in real time and live vicariously through my struggles as I work through the various phases of the project. At times things may get a little technical (I want this to be a detailed documentation of the process), so if you find yourself confused feel free to skip ahead or come back when a new post appears. If you know GIS yourself and find yourself thinking “Well that was a dumb way of doing that!”, please let me know! This is a learning experience after all and I still have much to learn. If you are a fellow student in the course, now or in the future, I would love to hear from you about your own experiences.

So what’s next? Well, several things:

• the first important task in the course is to choose the subject matter for the project – I have several ideas, none that I have settled on yet, so I will likely make a separate post about that in the next few days;
• second, I would like to flesh out the content on this site so that you can see some of the things that I have been up to so far;
• at the same time as learning GIS, I also have been learning to code; initially Python and a little bit of SQL, and more recently HTML and CSS – at some point I would like to put these skills to use and create my own website from the ground up, although that is probably some way off still;
• finally, I would like to continue my education in all things GIS by earning a M.Sc. in Geographic Information Science from the University of Edinburgh – stay tuned for more about that!

That’s all for now. I hope you’ll check out the rest of the site (once there is some content!) and consider subscribing to the blog to follow along with my progress. Thanks, and see you soon! Euan