As academics, we’re always told to do a literature review at the beginning of a research project (indeed, a literature review for a PhD may take many months) – but what about doing a data review? Whether you write it up formally (like a literature review) or not, I think it is important to sit down […]
I must say that I’m not a huge fan of much of the ArcGIS interface – and I particularly dislike the many levels of nested dialog that you have to use to change various options while creating printed maps. Some of the worst of these are the dialogs for inserting, styling and configuring legends – […]
Summary: Put a plaintext file named CITATION in the root directory of your code, and put information in it about how to cite your software. Go on, do it now – it’ll only take two minutes! Software is very important in science – but good software takes time and effort that could be used to do […]
Summary: When you use the Pixel Locator or Cursor Location/Value tool in ENVI, the latitude and longitude co-ordinates given are based on the datum that the image is in, not necessarily WGS-84. This may be obvious to some people, but it wasn’t to me – and I thought that if I got confused then some other […]
As part of my PhD I wanted to use a simple model which would give me an estimation of the atmospheric ozone amount given a location and time of year. A simple model to do this was created by van Heuklon in 1979, and was described in a delightfully simple paper (unfortunately not freely available […]
This is a first of a number of posts based upon discussions I had while at the Collaborations Workshop 2013 (#CollabW13 on twitter) in Oxford, UK. During one of the sessions I described a simple technique that I try and use to increase the sustainability, reproducibility and releasability of code that I write, data I […]
Summary: A useful guide to automating ArcGIS using Python, which is fully up-to-date with the latest version of ArcGIS. Definitely provides "quick answers to common problems", but it may take more effort to get a deep understanding of the methods used. Good breadth of coverage – but notably lacks raster examples – and well explained […]
In honour of the bicentenary of John Snow’s birth – and because I was asked to by someone via email – I have now released my digitisation of John Snow’s Cholera data in a few other formats: KML and as Google Fusion Tables. To save you reading my previous blog posts on the subject, I’ll […]
Updated 6th Jan 2020: This post has been updated to fix the code example and the link to the Landsat shapefile download. As part of some work I was doing for my PhD, I needed to automatically find what Landsat scene path and row would contain a pixel with a certain latitude/longitude co-ordinate (this was […]
The New Year is a time of new beginnings – and so it is rather appropriate to launch the complete redesign of my Free GIS Data list today. As you can see from the screenshot above, it looks far nicer than before – but it is also far easier to navigate. The dropdown […]