It’s  been a very long time since my last blog post, so I guess I can’t make the excuse that nothing exciting has happened to me so I have nothing to write about. However, after spending a whole semester working at CURVE and as a SIF, I’ve learned so many things and had experiences I never would have thought of just a year ago. Now, that may sound like I’ve been going on crazy adventures as a SIF, but no, it’s much more simpler and I guess boring from an outsider’s perspective. I just find myself constantly attending meetings, working with maps from the 60s, and using software I never knew existed until a few months ago. Either way, all of this IS pretty much an adventure to me in a way, as I’m gaining experiences I would never get if I were to just attend classes and go home just like so many other students.

Last semester, I pretty much worked on one project only, which was the Atlanta Mass Transit Project. Here’s a quick overview of the project: First we search for old, digitized maps of anything regarding the current Marta system, or a future development plan of the rail system. Then we pull up these maps on ArcGIS, and basically trace over the parts of the map that depict train lines. After lots of careful editing, we create a “shapefile” to be exported to ArcGIS online, where we could then upload on a different map which we could then publish for the world to see. Our final objective is to create something called a StoryMap, a feature from ArcGIS which basically contains many different ways to present mapping data. We want to show how MARTA has developed over the years, how it may develop further in the future, and how it may have never developed.

At this point, after the hard work of all the project members of mapping out these train lines, we’ve pretty much depleted all the usable maps from the GSU online collection, so now we’re just sifting through them once again for inaccuracies or maybe just laziness. It is time consuming, and also a strain on the eyes sometimes, but it is really cool when we look at our first draft of our project, in which we overlay the train lines from every single map we’ve used onto one map. There’s still work to be done, but I believe we’ve already passed the hard part. There were lots of other problems with this and with ArcGIS, but I’ll save those complaints for my next post.

Shakib