Mapping California Communities: An Introduction to GIS and Community Demographic Analysis Workshop - One Day Workshop

This fast paced, hands-on workshop teaches the fundamentals of how to use a Geographic Information System (GIS) in a way that is particularly relevant to social service providers, planners and researchers. Participants learn to make thematic maps of their community, geocode addresses and perform spatial queries and analysis. Participants also learn to extract and map Census variables such as race, poverty, language, education, health and many other demographic variables. Exercises are designed for beginners. Intermediate Excel skills required. Each students is assigned a computer on which to work for the day.

Upcoming Schedule (Please note: Workshops are one day only from 8:30 am to 4:30 pm. Participants choose only one day on which to attend.)  

Each workshop is customized for the city in which it is taught.

Sacramento: January 10, 2006     
San Francisco: January 11 and 12, 2006     
San Jose: January 11 and 12, 2006     
City of Orange: January 25, 26, 27

Fee:     $399 Checks, Credit Cards and Purchase Orders Accepted 

To register online or for more info visit https://www.urban-research.info/ur/workshops/workshops-gis.shtml or telephone us 877.241.6576.                               

Workshop Materials

Materials include a comprehensive workbook (75 pages), which includes the presentation, exercises and reference worksheets, ArcGIS (ArcView 9.1) software 60-day trial CD set, a subscription to the Planners' ToolBox subscription service which provides access to new 2004 Tiger/Line geography files (already converted to shapefiles) such as streets, zip codes, school districts, voting districts, census tracts and many other useful geographies. The subscription also includes the Analyzing Your Community Workshop: Using the Census to Better Analyze Changing Places and People online web workshop. 

Workshop Agenda

Lesson 1
Learn the basic functions of ArcGIS 9.1
Adding data and geography layers
Working with Layouts

Lesson 2
Introduction to Census Bureau's American Factfinder
Downloading Census and American Community Survey data to map
Downloading free geography files including tracts, zip codes, blocks and several others
Preparing Census tract data in Excel to import into ArcGIS
Lesson 3
Creating thematic (color shaded) maps to display data
Joining data with geography files
Working with legends and interval breaks

Lesson 4
Address mapping (geocoding)
Downloading free business addresses

Lesson 5
Performing location queries
Performing attribute queries
Creating target area shapefiles

Lesson 6
Elements of good maps including colors, fonts and map must haves
Critique of several maps 


Praise from participants of the Mapping California Communities Workshop

City of San Francisco: "One of the best computer training courses I've been to, lively, informative, good level of difficulty for target audience."

California Cancer Registry: "The workshop was great! The instructor is very knowledgeable and helpful. I would definitely recommend this course to a new GIS user."

UCLA: "This was such a great course! I appreciated the information on where to find useful data."

Fresno City College: "This workshop was very informative and enlightening. It demonstrated very powerful tools and concepts that I will definitely be using in the future. The instructor was patient and gave a lot of technical insight to the product." 

New Urban Research, Inc. is a national social research organization specializing in quantitative and spatial community analysis.  
New Urban Research, Inc. 33232 NE 33rd Ave Portland, Oregon 97212 | 877.241.6576 | www.urban-research.info 

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