School of Architecture and Planning

Grades for Lab #4 and Lab #5 are online now. Please check your grades on Stellar and let us know if you are missing grades from Lab #2 to Lab #5.

Comments:

Lab #4
1. Remember to add the legend--without legend, the map hardly means anything;
2. Use a meaningful map title to show the main theme of your map ("Working with 2000 census data & MIT Geodata Repository" makes no sense to the reader);
3. It is a good habit to site the datasource if you have the information;
4. Always keep classification method and exclusion in mind when making the map.

Lab #5
1. Remember to add (or turn on!) the "small island" layer;
2. Give a lable in the legend to the excluded features and do remember exclusion!
3. Specify the UNIT in the legend (e.g. population density);
4. When doing density calculation, pay attention to the units in the table and check the final results to see whether they make sense.

1. Don’t forget to exclude the features with no data available and to give a unique symbology (color or texture) for the exclusion. For those printouts in black and white, it is good to paint the null value with some texture to avoid confusion with other shades.
2. More than 7 gradients of one color are difficult for eyes to distinguish.
3. In terms of classification, pick one according to your data presentation purpose. Quantile should be used as said in the instruction for the housing sale points representation. 
4. Pay attention to the layer orders—usually lines are above polygons and points are above lines.
5. When printing out in black and white, using standard deviation as classification method is good to show abnormality trend but the directions of the deviations are hard to distinguish.
6. Format and make sense of the legend for readers. “camborder” or “cambtigr arc” might confuse readers.
7. Better to use whole values on the scale bar, and if the unit is in feet, when it is over some thousand, it is somewhat difficult for readers to make sense of the scale and better use miles.
8. We include comments 5, 6, and 7 to help you make a habit of taking steps to make your maps more readable and clear. (Missing one of these is generally not enough to generate a ‘check-minus,’ but we do want you to get familiar with the ArcGIS tools that you will need to insure that you maps are clear and readable.) 

• Check Plus “V+” means you have done a good job on all we expected – plus, an exceptionally good job on one or more aspects of the work. We do not give many check-pluses (and you do *not* need check-pluses to get an ‘A’ in the class!). We just want a way to indicate when we think the work has particularly good quality and clarity.
• Check “V” means you have completed the lab successfully and accomplished all that we expected;
• Check Minus “V-” means there are one or two key points you have missed, and you should review.

We have set up separate Stellar sites for 11.188 and 11.520 in order to facilitate turning in and returning the future lab exercises and homework.  For now, we will keep the course description, syllabus, and schedule on the regular website: http://mit.edu/11.520/www for both classes.  For the Stellar websites the Lab Exercise and Homework schedules are posted under the "Homework" section along with the exercises beginning with Lab #2 and Homework #1.  Use the Stellar mechanism to 'add submission' in order to turn in these and subsequent assignments.