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Introducing QGIS

March 5, 2012, 11:00 am

By Konrad Lawson

Over the last few years there are a growing number of universities who offer workshops and instruction for faculty and students in the use of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) software. Most of us in the humanities, to be sure, are probably still hitting up our map librarians for a quick map for that book manuscript, scanning or photocopying maps we find in books around us—or even worse—trying to draw something by hand for our lectures and handouts.  However, I suspect more than a few of us find ourselves looking on in envy at those social science PhD students we see working late in the campus computer labs who appear to be doing wondrous but complicated looking things with maps in some kind of program called ArcGIS.

I have personally faced two major frustrations with learning geographic software:

1) The leading software package out there, the ArcGIS suite, is expensive and, in my humble opinion, ranks as one of the most user-unfriendly pieces of software I have ever come across.

2) The workshops and online tutorials I have come across, while often very well thought out and presented, usually assume that my goal as a student of GIS is eventually to carry out data analysis; that is, that I would want to plot geographic data from multiple layers of information and then solve some problem I have posed through an analysis of the available spatial data.

While the analysis of spatial data is a wonderful addition to the quantitative toolbox of the scholar, I’m just not there yet and, given the sparcity and irregularity of data for my area and time period of study, anything produced through these methods is likely to be more misleading than helpful.

Instead, I just want to make some cool maps. Perhaps a clean topographical map of the areas I am writing about, maybe listing just ta few cities and other locations I wish to highlight. Or, at a slightly higher level of complexity, a few maps with, say, treason cases per province. While it is possible to do some of this on Google Maps or Google Earth, we are stuck with the base layers underneath that display information we may not want (more on another alternatives, including WorldMap and MapBox, in an upcoming posting).

Since my demands for GIS are relatively limited, and I neither want to assume I’ll always have access to school licensing for ArcGIS, or want to payout for expensive software, I was delighted to find that an open source application QGIS that, while as frustrating to learn as ArcGIS, is free and works on Windows, Linux, and the Max OS X. Even in the year I have been using it, the software has improved considerably, and the community of users and online resources behind it has also exploded.

After attending a few workshops on GIS and then retooling what I learned on ArcGIS for QGIS I gave a bootcamp presentation at THATcamp New England last year in which I showed how you can use QGIS to create simple maps. It is unfortunately a little too much to fit the tutorial given then into a single Profhacker posting. I have posted the slides for the presentation and the crowdsourced audience notes in a Google Document, but looking back, they don’t really stand alone as a tutorial. I hope, however, that the many links provided in it can serve as a starting point for those that are interested.

With a little time investment, I believe that becoming comfortable in an open source GIS environment like QGIS can go a long way for those of us in the humanities. Increasingly, prepared layers of geographic information, or at least tables of easily geocoded data can be found downloaded from various locations online. Being able to take any of that data and project it on a map for use in a classroom setting or in our publications, even without employing more advanced analysis does not require more than a few hours of investment in a GIS education.

Have you ever given QGIS a try? If so, what was your experience like? Do you have any favorite online tutorials specifically targeting the beginning GIS user who is using QGIS, as opposed to ArcGIS?

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  • sarahr

    I’ve had the QGIS installation package sitting on my desktop for a couple months. This post is serving as the impetus for getting it installed.

  • aldrichsteve

    Konrad, I wonder if you’ve tried ArcGIS recently (i.e., version 10)?

    QGIS is great and free (I’ve used it to teach GIS concepts in environments where ArcGIS is not available), but for many higher education users in the US ArcGIS licenses are owned by the institution and available, you just have to ask your license administrator for a license (see:   http://www.esri.com/industries/university/academic_programs/sitelic-campuswide.html  to see if your campus has a license). Also, the software is much less user-unfriendly than it used to be, and data to just make some maps (rather than execute analyses) can be streamed over the internet readily.
    As an ESRI site license administrator, I am always happy when a faculty member or student asks for access to ArcGIS, and I am doubly-excited when that student or faculty member is in a discipline where the application is going to be novel or interesting (e.g., when my economics colleagues ask for the software I am happy to help, but when a student from our arts department comes by I’m always curious how they’re going to use the software because it’s likely to be so far out of the “normal application” that a social scientist like myself would employ). 

    I also always hand out online training codes to anyone who expresses interest. Just like any piece of software, when you spend a few hours familiarizing yourself with it you become a much better user… I would argue that a user can make good maps in ArcGIS with only “a few hours of investment in a GIS education” as well.

  • http://twitter.com/kmlawson K M Lawson

    I’m happy that many universities have a license. As someone who has, several times, lost access to software as I make my way between institutions and someone who is considering a life outside the academy, I don’t care much for a dependence on licenses tied to institutions.
    I would love to use open source software when possible and not too onerous (especially when it supports OS X which desktop arcgis does not). Especially since my needs are not that great and many of the advanced features of ArcGIS are not necessary for me, then either an open source option like QGIS (for an offline application) or some of the web services I will introduce in future postings are alternatives but still not ideal ones. I think there are still huge opportunities out there for an “iMap” that meet the needs of those for whom Google Maps/Earth are not sufficient but for whom the power and flexibility of ArcGIS (and QGIS) are far more than we need. I am sad to find, as I found in an email sent to me today about this posting, that some of those trained in GIS have a tendency to look down upon those of us who just want to make “pretty maps” – as opposed to the grown ups, presumably, who do “real GIS.” It is true, humanities scholars like myself are not in the target audience for ArcGIS. I don’t blame them for that. However, there is a market out there that is not well met, however, and a missed opportunity. Good simple maps are extremely important for us, and nothing to sneeze at. There are no good tools out there which can create them easily. The power to easily create them, exactly the way we want them, showing only what we want to show, perhaps making use of some existing geocoded data out there, is really important. In the absence of good tools to do this easily, we make due with other GIS applications like ArcGIS or QGIS. I’m sure this will work itself out eventually.

  • nickbearman

    Great article – thanks for posting it on here. 
    A useful link for GIS data is http://www.gadm.org/ which contains country outlines (and lower divisions, such as states, counties, etc.) for most of the countries in the world. GIS is often difficult to access, and an ‘iMap’ program would be a very interesting development. I am no expert in QGIS, but am currently developing a 2 day course as a basic introduction to GIS using QGIS. Based on this (and other teaching experiences) once you have covered the basics, a users covering a wide range of different subjects can create a basic map relatively easily. However (as the students often discover) the devil is in whether you can get hold of the data you want to map, and I find that people with limited technology skills struggle. Obviously this is not a problem for people reading this, but it is something to remember when teaching GIS – you can end up spending a good 25% of your time covering basic computer skills, which is not ideal for the student or the instructor. 

  • rmrothaus

    I use QGIS all the time.  Initially I used it because I left the university world and couldn’t afford ArcGIS.  I don’t think I would go back, however.  For my contracting and research (archaeology/history), QGIS does everything I need.  The ArcGIS interface is much easier than it used to be, but QGIS is simpler and does everything I need.  I found QGIS so easy I never bothered with a tutorial.   What I do is reasonably complicated–I’m building an archaeological probability model for a National Park at the moment.

    I also use Delorme XMAP editor.  That’s not free, but costs much less than ArcGIS.   I have found that XMAP is so easy I can teach someone to use it in a day or so, and they gain proficiency within a week.  XMAP is limited, but the reality is my field staff live in world of USGS topos, aerial photos, and simple points, lines and polygons.  With XMAP we do most of our GIS realtime in the field.    Many environmental consultants use XMAP instead of ESRI, and it is pretty popular with wind farm developers.

    I’ll also point out that I occasionally join up with academic projects that are wed to ArcGIS, so I have used all three simultaneously in the field. ArcGIS is overkill.  In my experience, the near total reliance on ESRI products at universities has greatly slowed the use of GIS in some fields.  The learning curve is too steep, and the programs too complicated for occasional users.  Because the system is built to teach the depth of ArcGIS, I frequently see people doing things that are much, much harder than they need to be.   Don’t forget Google Earth; it’s is getting very close to working as a functional GIS.

  • palazzo

    I have used both ArcView and QGIS. At the level of complexity I work with it doesn’t really make a difference, other than the fact that QGIS runs on Mac and ArcView doesn’t. Both are good at connecting with databases and lousy at generating beautifully rendered maps. The data source you are using is much more relevant than the program you use to display it. At some point it even makes sense to preprocess data in the database itself rather than in the GIS program, particularly if you have to query the same joins several times.

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  • aldrichsteve

    I, too, would prefer open source, freely available software for analysis and presentation, and this is why I’m glad you’re presenting QGIS (and other things in the future) to Profhacker readers. I also sympathize with the reaction you’ve received from GIS practitioners — shame on them! I think some of that is probably rooted in the knowledge that making “simple maps” actually requires a good deal of knowledge. 

    For example, the default data projection in QGIS is a “geographic” projection, completely unsuitable for area or distance calculations; if one were to jump right in and start using the software (as many of us did to learn how to use a word processor or spreadsheet program) the user could easily make catastrophic errors. At best, the “trained in a few hours” GIS user “just making maps” will produce maps with significant distortions and probably some issues with getting the message across. Good simple maps include good simple typography, label placement, color selection, map projection choice, legend categorization, standardization of quantitative data, etc. This is a lot to be aware of, and the ruder GIS specialists out there tend to scoff at the idea of a lay user making a “good simple map” because it is typically much more than a quick task.To put it in perspective, take the discipline of Geography. You would assume that nearly all Geographers could put together a good map, regardless of when they were doing said mapmaking (1920, 1950, today). Such an assumption would be wrong. For many Geographers publishing articles with good simple maps the solution was, and continues to be, to hire a cartographer, often a professional employed by their university or the venue of publication, to create that map for them. Even today many of the Geographers who are highly cited or serve in prestigious national academic organizations would likely prefer to have good simple maps made by a professional cartographer or at least a graduate student who had studied cartography.You’re absolutely right that there’s a market out there for a software solutions, be they online or offline, which would create accurate location or simple thematic maps for users who are not geospatial analysts! The difficulty is that making a “good simple map” is not all that simple, and such a piece of software would, at least initially, be very limited (e.g., only “location” maps) or very expensive (as ArcGIS is). 

    I look forward to future posts on alternative map display tools – and I hope the above does not seem like I’m being a GIS bully… I’m just trying to defend my less friendly colleagues and attempting to give some context for why they’re so skeptical. In the end, though, they do themselves a disservice by making it seem likes these tools are only for spatial “grown ups” — GIS tools have really become quite accessible and relatively easy to use for those who have a pretty good handle on how computers work (which, as nickbearman points out below, is often the heart of the problem we run into when we teach this stuff!). QGIS is a great example! gvSIG is another option… 

  • lexberman

    hi Konrad,
    thanks for this!   Since you asked about tutorials, I am teaching a workshop on QGIS at Harvard and the tutorial is available for anyone online here:   http://maps.cga.harvard.edu/qgis/

  • http://twitter.com/kmlawson K M Lawson

    Really wonderful Lex! This is better than I have seen anywhere else, including QGIS own family of websites!

  • cschroeder

    Thanks for posting this!  I have been looking for a good QGIS tutorial, and I am going to give it a try.  I’ve only made it through the install step, and I hit a snag with the terminal command that required a techie who knew more terminal commands than I.  (Replace “su -” with “sudo -” if you have any problems entering your password.)  Hopefully the rest will be smooth sailing.

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