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Getting Started with QGIS - Ep 184
680 Plays3 years ago
Dr. Edward Gonzalez-Tennant joins us again as a guest co-host while Paul is surveying in the middle east. Ed is an expert in QGIS and on today's show he tells us how to get started and gives us some of his tips, tricks, and customization advice along the way.
Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/archaeotech/184
Links
QGIS Plug-Ins that Ed Recommends
- Quick Map Services for Basemaps
- Semi-Automatic Classification Area
- QGIS2WEB
Contact
- Chris Webster
- Twitter: @archeowebby
- Email: chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
- Paul Zimmerman
- Twitter: @lugal
- Email: paul@lugal.com
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Transcript
Support Archaeology Podcast Network
00:00:00
Speaker
While you're listening, go to archpodnet.com slash members and support our efforts. Let's get to the show. You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
Introduction and Episode Overview
00:00:14
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, episode 184. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my special guest co-host, Ed Gonzales-Tenet. Today we talk about how you can get started using QGIS.
Paul's Saudi Arabian Project
00:00:25
Speaker
Let's get to it.
00:00:28
Speaker
Welcome to the show everybody. Paul is still playing around in the desert in Saudi Arabia. Hopefully he's doing well over there. I haven't heard a ton from him just like last time, but that's okay. He's, he's working hard and hopefully having a good time and hopefully finding a lot of good stuff at the same time. Really looking forward to talking to him when he gets back about this project that he's been on.
Ed's QGIS Teaching Resources
00:00:48
Speaker
But for now, we have back on Ed Gonzales, tenant again as a guest co-host. How's it going, Ed? Great. Thanks for having me yet again.
00:00:57
Speaker
Yeah, no worries. Well, last time, and I can't remember if we talked about it on the show or if we talked about it just in planning for the show, but you have some resources around QGIS and teaching people how to use QGIS and you teach your students that.
00:01:12
Speaker
Again, you have some resources that we will link to in the show notes so you can kind of follow along there if you want to, by just looking down at your device and clicking into the show notes, you can see that stuff. And we're also going to keep this episode a little bit shorter than normal just because it's going to be, you know, I'm not saying very technical, I don't want to make this sound like it's hard, but this is kind of a guide and I want people to be able to
00:01:32
Speaker
see this episode as something they can follow if they want to start using QGIS and how to get started with that.
What is QGIS?
00:01:40
Speaker
So why don't you give us a quick start about just briefly what QGIS is, maybe kind of as a piece of software, not like a GIS, but just like not really an origin story, but a little bit about QGIS.
00:01:55
Speaker
Well, QGIS saw a movie in Queens, New York with its parents. And then when they walked down the alley after, no, I'm kidding. Um, there's your origin story for QGIS. It's the Batman of GIS software.
00:02:10
Speaker
Nice, nice. There you go. So yeah, QGIS, I would say, and some folks may have heard of it years ago when it was called Quantum GIS. So that's where the queue comes from.
How to Download and Install QGIS?
00:02:26
Speaker
But it is basically, I would say at this point, it is the most popular free and open source geographic information system available.
00:02:36
Speaker
And it's very easy to get, right? Like any of, like most open source software. In this case, you go to the main website, which is qgis.org. Very easy to remember. And right on that main page, you're going to see a button that says download now. And what's I think really cool about QGIS is that, you know, when you, when you click that download now button,
00:03:02
Speaker
It doesn't matter what operating system you're using, you're going to be able to install QGIS natively on that operating system, whether that's a Macintosh or Windows or even one of the many flavors of Unix.
00:03:17
Speaker
or Linux, sorry, that's out there like Ubuntu that I think a lot of people use. So it's really kind of an effortless install. You click that download button, and it's going to usually auto-detect what operating system you have, and it's going to present the instructions about how to install it. And it's usually like a one-click installer that you download or interact with, and then it just adds it into your system.
00:03:42
Speaker
Okay. Now, before we get too far, you mentioned that this was one of the most popular open source GIS tools out there. You know what? I don't think I know because I'm not in this space really. I use QGIS and it works, so I don't really seek around for other alternatives. And I don't use Esri products in my small company just because they're too expensive. And they're not really that necessary, to be honest with you, for what I need to do.
00:04:06
Speaker
Now, just so people know what else is out there, can you think of any other open source GIS products on the market off the top of your head? So yeah, there are a couple and actually many of them get integrated into QGIS. So when I was an undergrad,
00:04:23
Speaker
many, many years ago, the University of Arkansas, this would be the early 2000s. They actually had a course in GRASS GIS. And so GRASS, G-R-A-S-S, it stands for something like geographic resources analysis support system, I think. And that's another open source. I don't know that it always was,
00:04:47
Speaker
but it certainly is now.
Open Source GIS Alternatives and Integration
00:04:50
Speaker
The cool thing is, you know, a lot of people who may have learned GIS back in the 90s or even the early aughts might have encountered coursework with this. It certainly was used by like academics and like government agencies. You know, the cool thing is if you're familiar with those tools or that system, it's actually been integrated into QGIS. I would say the
00:05:12
Speaker
The other one that springs to mind for me is, and I hope I pronounced this correct, it's SAGA or S-A-G-A. That's another open source. I believe it's open source. I mean, you can download it and install it anyway. Geographic information system. And well, actually that's more like a geospatial analysis suite of tools. But again,
00:05:36
Speaker
that can be integrated into QGIS. So I'm going to sound like I'm on a soapbox for QGIS, probably this whole episode. I guess in some ways I am. I believe in it a lot and I do pretty much all my GIS work with it now. But this is one of the cool things about open source software. We've talked about three now.
00:05:55
Speaker
But they all integrate with each other. And so if you've learned or worked with one, you can move into QGIS pretty easily. And the other one I should mention, although I will confess, I have not yet started to work with it.
00:06:11
Speaker
is R, which, you know, people know is a statistics package, but it also has very robust geographic and spatial analysis tools built into it as well. Now R and QGIS, I don't think they integrate in any direct way.
00:06:29
Speaker
And of course, R is much more of a, you know, you've got to kind of code to make that work. I'm hoping to, and you've already mentioned, you know, I have a YouTube series about working with QGIS for archaeology. I hope to, over the next year or two, get more familiar with R and maybe try to provide a series of tutorials for that. Obviously, like our sort of sibling disciplines in anthropology, like biological anthropology, which obviously uses statistics a lot, as does, you know, a good number of archaeologists.
00:06:59
Speaker
They, I think, have made further inroads into incorporating R as a sub-discipline.
R's Statistical and Spatial Analysis Capabilities
00:07:04
Speaker
Although, again, there are lots of archaeologists who make their R and QGIS packages or plug-ins, you know, what would kind of be extensions in the Esri universe or ecosystem. They make them freely available out there. So I would say those are probably the most common
00:07:24
Speaker
open source slash free GIS programs that an archaeologist would be likely to encounter. I'm sure there are other ones, but those are the ones that spring to mind for me.
00:07:34
Speaker
Yeah, I think now that we're talking about this, I remember Grass and I'm pretty sure in my grad school I used, and I might be getting this wrong because I'm pretty sure it's the only time I ever used it, at the University of Georgia back in, what, 2010 was Surfer. I mean, so I think Surfer, actually I downloaded that recently because I was working with some remotely sensed data. I just kind of wanted to test its tools. I do think Surfer is paid software though.
00:07:59
Speaker
Is it? Okay. Okay. Gotcha. Yeah. I wasn't sure. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I think you can get like a free trial and they're friendly to academics, you know, like they might have a academic pricing or even free, but obviously not everybody is an academic and can do that. So.
00:08:18
Speaker
Indeed. So you mentioned the operating systems that QGIS can be downloaded on, which is, I mean, for the most part, all of them that people routinely use. Are there any other system requirements that you can think of for someone downloading this? Like they're on like a school laptop or something like that, or what have you? Is there anything? Because people typically think of GIS as a pretty resource intensive thing. And in fact, I still think of
00:08:43
Speaker
offices that I've worked for, CRM companies, where the most powerful computers in the entire building are in the GIS department. But what about QGIS's requirements as far as that goes? So yes, I would say that the system requirements for QGIS are going to be less than ESRI. You know, I don't want this to be an anti ESRI slash pro QGIS episode either. I think we'll talk later or at some point, I think it's important to be familiar with both ecosystems, particularly if you want a career doing GIS and archaeology.
00:09:12
Speaker
But obviously, Esri is shifting. A lot of us learned ArcGIS Desktop. That's what I'm still most familiar with. But in another two or three years, that goes away. And so most students now, I think, are using ArcGIS Pro. And that's going to be a forced switch for any Esri users. And I think you can find people on both sides of the fence as to whether or not that's a good or bad thing.
00:09:42
Speaker
But certainly ArcGIS Desktop was a very resource intensive program. I think a lot of us felt like it was a sort of program where they kept adding to, but not necessarily streamlining. And so it became increasingly clunky. And I think everybody, student, somebody who teaches GIS, somebody who uses GIS, if you had any experience with Esri, you became very familiar with it crashing.
00:10:11
Speaker
And, you know, I think it's, it's probably spawned a whole, I don't know, like a whole comedic industry in geospatial circles about as you crashing. So QGIS is certainly in my experience far more stable. It is, I think a much more lightweight program.
00:10:27
Speaker
You know, like a lot of open source software, it's got an active developer community. And I think in some ways that, you know, it's kind of like, you know, I guess like usually too many cooks in a kitchen is a bad thing. But in this case, I think having that many cooks in a sort of open source environment actually becomes a very good thing.
00:10:47
Speaker
Okay, for instance, if you had an old computer, you know, I think a lot of us have experimented with the idea of installing or have right installing Linux like Ubuntu on our systems, particularly older computers.
00:11:00
Speaker
One of the reasons we go in that direction with an older machine is because it's far less resource intensive than say Windows. And I would say this name is kind of true for QGIS versus Esri. QGIS is out of the box going to be far less resource intensive.
00:11:17
Speaker
That's at least one reason why it's going to be more stable. So, you know, when I teach this, you know, I teach courses in like digital heritage and GIS for archeology.
QGIS vs ArcGIS: System Requirements
00:11:28
Speaker
And I try to always include at least a section in QGIS and what's really cool.
00:11:34
Speaker
is that's a section where everyone just works on stuff at home, because it doesn't matter what computer they own personally. Maybe a Chromebook might not do it, but that's a different thing altogether. But most students, I think most students actually own Macs at this point. But most students have either a Mac or a Windows machine. They install it. They can do all the stuff anywhere they're taking their laptop.
00:12:00
Speaker
for the most part, any laptop you buy off the shelf, I would say is going to work for like 90% of the kind of like common archaeological things you would do at GIS, right? Like, I'm always thinking like,
00:12:15
Speaker
When I'm teaching students, what would you do if you got a job in CRM, whether that's like a private agent or a company or federal agency? You know, what's the majority of what you're doing, like inventory and map making and, you know, some basic analysis maybe, but a lot of it's controlling data, making sense of it. And QGIS is going to work with that very robustly, very easily on pretty much any system. Okay.
00:12:38
Speaker
Well, sounds good. All right. Well, I've got some, some other initial startup steps after you've got it installed, but I think we'll talk about that on the other side of the break back in a minute.
00:12:50
Speaker
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00:14:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the Archiotech podcast, episode 184. We're talking with Ed Gonzales-Tenon about getting started with QGIS. You've got QGIS installed on your system. Where do you go next? Obviously, you want to manipulate some data that you're going to bring in or something like that, but as a pro QGIS user and somebody who teaches this, are there any
00:14:33
Speaker
I guess settings or configurations that you would recommend before someone even decides to bring data into QJAS, any like plugins they need to download or something like that, that would help out with how this just works. So, you know, this, this is probably a good, I don't know, as good a point as any to plug my, my ArcGIS, sorry.
00:14:52
Speaker
my cue GIS for archaeology, YouTube, it's like a playlist. So if you go to youtube.com slash anthro yeti, that's my alter ego. I have a whole it's like 16 videos right now. That is basically walks you through it assumes no GIS experience.
00:15:11
Speaker
And it walks people through getting up and running with QGIS specifically with the intention of doing, I mean, honestly, like 90% or more of cultural resource management work. That was really the point for me was to create a series of tutorials. And quite frankly, there's probably some in there that most people in CRM might never use as well. Like, you know, people don't get to work with LiDAR as much as they may want to, but I have several videos about working with LiDAR.
00:15:40
Speaker
Nice. Yeah, there are a couple things that I recommend straight after installing it. QGIS, you expand it by adding plugins. If you're in an Esri mindset, you get the extensions. If you're talking dollars and cents, extensions can often cost more than the base Esri software does.
00:16:08
Speaker
So in QGIS ecosystem or world, we're talking plugins. And there are paid plugins. There are people who develop plugins that charge for them, but the vast majority of plugins are freely developed and available for anyone. And so when you're in QGIS, it's a series of dropdown menus. Most people who've used Esri products, particularly ArcGIS Pro with its like ribbon interface, like all Microsoft products now,
00:16:37
Speaker
You're going to feel pretty at home in QGIS, right? And so, you know, if you want to access those plugins, there's going to be a dropdown menu and that dropdown menu is creatively named.
00:16:52
Speaker
plugins. I was trying to make that more dramatic, right? But yeah, it's obvious. You click it and it'll be like, manage and install plugins. And then you can go in there and you're going to see like a bewildering array of plugins. I mean, hundreds of them. But some of the ones that I recommend right out of the gate would be like a quick map services, right?
QGIS Plugins and Their Importance
00:17:18
Speaker
So people who use Esri are familiar with putting base maps.
00:17:21
Speaker
in their GIS, and Esri has a whole series of base maps. And again, like there's a topo and a terrain and satellite, which is like an aerial and national geographic, right? The ones a lot of people have used. Other people, anytime you've gone to maps.google.com, those are base maps. The cool thing is when you install this, and it's one of the first videos, it's in one of the first videos,
00:17:48
Speaker
that I put up there, you get access to dozens of base maps. You actually get access to all the Esri base maps.
00:17:57
Speaker
all the Google base maps and like a couple dozen or more other ones, open street map and so forth. And I will be honest. And again, you know, I hope nobody from Esri comes after me or no Esri users get upset, but I have found the Esri base maps load far faster in QGIS than they do even in Esri products themselves. So, you know, and it's really neat to watch that, to add that plugin,
00:18:25
Speaker
Once you've done it, you understand how this works. I mean, it's sort of like you open a window in QGIS and it's like shopping for extensions, except they're free. Nice. And so any active plugin that's being maintained by a member of the user community, and that's not necessarily the core developers of QGIS. This includes
00:18:51
Speaker
just, I don't know, like random people, but it also includes like archeologists. I mean, there are archeologists who are actively creating plugins for QGIS. So if you want to do things like view fit analysis, you're going to probably download a plugin that was actually written and is maintained by an archeologist. There you go. There you go. I will, I will pause and say if anybody from Esri is listening to this, we are actively taking sponsorship and we'll be glad to advertise for you. So there you go.
00:19:20
Speaker
Well, and I cannot stress the importance of supporting this podcast to you, Esri. No, I can't stress honestly, like all my students, you know, everywhere I've taught, everywhere I've worked, right? I've done both. I've worked in CRM professionally and I've taught universities.
00:19:38
Speaker
everywhere you need to really I think it's important to be conversant in both Esri and something else. I think students who want to be particularly well positioned to do like geospatial archaeology as either a researcher or a professional
00:19:55
Speaker
they should really be exploring both of these software ecosystems because for me personally, I'm in a research environment. If I'm honest, I have the luxury that I can be fully open source. And most of the time, 90% of what happens in a CRM outfit can be done in QGIS. But if
00:20:17
Speaker
you know how to do it and you have the extensions and Esri is there and we all know what deadlines mean. They mean something completely different in a professional capacity than they often do in an academic setting. You can't sort of, you know, like, I'm just going to experiment with this for six months until it works.
Why Learn Both Esri and QGIS?
00:20:35
Speaker
You have to have it done. And I think the students who are conversant in both ecosystems are very well positioned. So, you know, again, yeah, Esri or Esri users are listening. We're talking about QGIS because it's cool.
00:20:47
Speaker
But I think you become a particularly powerful user if you're familiar with both. Yeah, for sure. It helps to diversify in anything that you're doing, to be honest. Absolutely. That's the maker mentality, I think. All right. So any other, you started with the one, and I'm writing these down in our show notes in case anybody's following along in those. Any other plugins you would recommend people download right off the bat, or just maybe some of your favorites?
00:21:10
Speaker
Well, I would say one of my, so I have, yeah, a number of ones that I use from time to time. Honestly, a lot of times if you're, you know, looking at these plugins and you want something to happen, like I want a view shed analysis, right? You're going to see, and even if you type in view shed into like the plugin search, you're going to see something called visibility analysis. And that is something that's actually being maintained by an archeologist and gives you
00:21:41
Speaker
a lot of those spatial analyst functions that you're familiar with in Esri. And in fact, I can see here, I'm looking at it, I pulled it up on my machine. I can see that it was last updated April of this year, right? So it's being maintained
00:21:58
Speaker
Um, and I've used this, uh, and you know, other, Oh, the other ones be, there is a, I think the abbreviation it's SCP, but it's the semi automatic classification plugin. Right. The name you have no idea what it would mean. That's a catchy title. Yeah. But it's, uh, yeah, that's the name of my next band semi automatic classification.
00:22:24
Speaker
Are you ready to rock? No. I mean, are you ready to rock Sentinel one, two and three images and Landsat images then, you know, and that's what it is. It's, it's a plugin that allows you to, you know, create your logins on, you know, like the European union websites for the Sentinel imagery or earth Explorer websites for the U S Landsat data, right? Landsat nine has been launched. We're starting to see data from that.
00:22:54
Speaker
So if you're working in an area where doing N, what is it, NDVI, so natural difference, no, I think natural difference vegetation index, I might be messing that up. But, you know, basically if you want to look at vegetation and how it's changed, and with some of this data, it now goes back 50 years.
00:23:16
Speaker
I'm working with the US Forest Service in the Ocala National Forest, and we're very interested to see how this 400 plus thousand acre forest has changed. Part of that is it allows us to look at human activity, like timber cuts, but it also lets us look at how are things changing from year to year. The climate's changing.
00:23:39
Speaker
And we can see that reflected in vegetation. So this plugin, SCP, if you go, you know, or search for in the plugin, it's semi-automatic classification. It's really cool. It literally allows you to set an area. Then you can preview satellite images from all of these different satellite, you know, different satellites that are circling the globe doing various forms.
00:24:02
Speaker
of typically multispectral imagery, and you can use it to do all sorts of cool stuff. It can literally, if you're not familiar with satellite imagery, it comes in bands. You combine those bands in different ways to produce things like the sort of real color image, what it looks like a photograph, but you can do infrared. You can do these other sorts of vegetation indexes. And, you know, a lot of archaeologists have used this around the world to look at land use environment. So human environment interaction and so forth.
00:24:32
Speaker
And that's there. And you can literally say, hey, I want to download these X number of images for this area.
Creating Interactive Maps with QGIS
00:24:40
Speaker
And I want you to automatically create real world colors and infrared and every and it just spits it out and adds it to QGIS automatically. That's really cool. And then the other one, I would say the other one I would I suggest people use
00:24:57
Speaker
is it's this little plugin called QGIS to web, like two, like literally the number two, QGIS to web, all one word. And that literally lets you take whatever map document you have open and just export it to a directory. And then you can upload that directory to like your web host. If you don't have a web host, you can do it to GitHub.
00:25:22
Speaker
And then it literally turns your map document into an interactive online map that you can share with anybody anywhere. Nice. That is really sweet. It's really cool. And so like for public outreach, I mean, you know, archeologists, we have to be careful about what we share, of course. Sure. But the ability to share a map with anyone for free that's interactive.
00:25:49
Speaker
I think is really powerful. I mean, you try to do that with Esri and you're talking about math credits and constant licensing, paying for those credits and so forth. And again, if you're in an academic setting or you're in a setting that has a relationship with Esri or you have plenty of money,
00:26:06
Speaker
That's fine, but I'm always thinking about the local history society, or the small group, or the group that's like, we can't commit to paying an annual fee for anything. These are the sorts of tools that I think come into play in those situations.
00:26:23
Speaker
That's really cool. All right. Well, we're going to move on with some steps to go from here. Now that you've got your base maps and your plugins and you're ready to go, we're going to see what the next step is. And I'm guessing it's bringing in your own data. And we'll talk about that on the other side of the break. Back in a minute.
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Speaker
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00:27:45
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 184 of the Architect Podcast, and we're wrapping up this discussion on getting started with QGIS with Ed Gonzalez-Tennett. And on the last segment, we had the system installed. We've got base maps. We've got a couple other cool plugins. Now let's talk about actually bringing data into the system. And I want to start real quick because I haven't used it, but I heard about this maybe a year or two ago. I can't remember the exact timeframe.
00:28:10
Speaker
But somebody, I don't know if QJS as an organization is even a thing with this being open source, but somebody developed an app for Android called, I think it was Field Notes or something like that, it was called, that you could actually use as almost a designed direct input for QJS. Do you know anything about that? And if there's an iOS version yet?
Q Field vs Esri's Collector App
00:28:29
Speaker
So I do, I'm aware of an app and it is, I think currently only available on Google Play. So that's a problem.
00:28:38
Speaker
called Q Field. Oh, Q Field. You're right. That's it. That's totally it. And Q Field basically acts as like, I mean, basically like a little mini QGIS sort of integration, sort of like a mini QGIS on your phone or tablet that you can, you know, basically use to collect data in real time. Right. So it's basically like having QGIS right there.
00:29:07
Speaker
And they offer integration, right? And so I haven't used this much because I am using open source GNSS like RTK GNSS receivers that I actually bought from a company in Colorado. And I'm using a different program to interface with it on my phone.
00:29:26
Speaker
And then I just save everything as a shapefile. So I'm doing something a little different. But this is something I'm interested in. There's certainly been, and there is a QGIS organization, you see it at qgis.org, and every year, and I think it's
00:29:44
Speaker
It's just happened or I think it's just happened or it's about to happen. There is like a user conference. I know the Esri one just happened, but I believe there's a QGIS one as well. That's pretty much always online. And last year there was a big workshop about Q field.
00:30:00
Speaker
And so, you know, it's, you know, obviously I think Esri offers collector, I think is what they call it. Yep. That's right. And it's basically right. Like have it on your mobile devices. And I think they all support any sort of external antenna that you would, you know, connect to your mobile device. So like an RTK GNSS, so you get like, you know, centimeter accuracy in real time. So yeah, Q field is something that I have not worked with that much, but I know that there is a lot.
00:30:30
Speaker
of energy going into it because a lot of people, I mean, you can imagine if you're in the Esri ecosystem and you're using collector, I think you can imagine how attractive it is to make something basically like that available to people for low to no cost. I do think there's subscription plans to let you store more data and stuff like that.
00:30:57
Speaker
But I think everyone can use it to a certain degree, and I haven't looked at this closely, to a certain degree for free.
00:31:07
Speaker
Okay. Okay. Now let's talk about data formats then. I'm curious as to, and this is, anybody familiar with GIS is going to be a pretty pedestrian style question, but just to get it out there, obviously you can take in shape files.
Data Format Compatibility in QGIS
00:31:21
Speaker
If you're familiar with GIS at all, you know about shape files and that's kind of like the bread and butter of a GIS system. But what other kinds of data sets can you bring into QGIS and by extension, pretty much any GIS I'd imagine.
00:31:33
Speaker
What kind of data sets can you bring in there and then work with as far as maybe file types and stuff like that? So that's, I mean, I, that's really important. In fact, like the, you know, if you look at my ArcGIS for, or QGIS, I can't believe it is a QGIS for Arc YouTube.
00:31:51
Speaker
play this you'll see like the first videos install it and then the next two videos are right working with the two most common data models vector or raster and talking about that and what's really cool with qgis and partly this is because esri has made some of their formats if not open at least they've shared
00:32:15
Speaker
You know, that so other people can, so yeah, the shape file, you can use that. Um, those of you who've added tabular data that have an X and Y column, you know, that, that are X and Y coordinates, northing Eastings or whatever. Um, you can do that just the same way. I mean, there's a whole hope, right? All sorts of different raster layers, you know, things use geo reference, but also rasters that are produced by Esri saga grass and other software.
00:32:43
Speaker
you can add geodatabases, right? So this is a proprietary format from Esri. A lot of people, if you work with like federal clients in the US, the federal government, they have specific geodatabase formats they want their data in. So you can at least
00:33:03
Speaker
access that data, writing to it is is not supported in quite the same way. But you know, if somebody sends you or like a lot of us who go to like state and federal data repositories, it's like you could download the whole state in geodatabase format. It's like, well,
00:33:19
Speaker
Okay, thank goodness QGIS reads that because if I don't have Esri, I couldn't read that otherwise. And again, if QGIS doesn't read like a file geodatabase, and I know I'm getting a little technical, there are different kinds of geodatabases and they exist because they have different capacities. And if you don't know what a geodatabase is, just know you can use it.
00:33:38
Speaker
If you do know what it is, and you know the differences between personal and file and so forth, know that some can be read with QGIS out of the box. Others might require a plugin, but you can get it up and running. That's the cool thing about open source. You go to Google, your favorite search engine. I don't know if any sponsor of the podcast, Duck Duck Go, we're talking to you.
00:34:00
Speaker
Geodatabase, QGIS, and you're going to find a whole host of, you know, how tos to get that up and running. Okay. I'm trying to think of other ones, you know, those are the ones I use most commonly. And so, yeah, I mean, there are other ones that can be used that I haven't even like explored personally, because they just don't really come up for us as archaeologists.
00:34:24
Speaker
Indeed. And along the lines of, you already mentioned, you know, common exports and things that people would accept. You know, sometimes, and a lot of times when I started using QGIS just for my small company with a rudimentary knowledge of GIS to begin with. I mean, I took a course in grad school and things like that, but I knew enough just to be dangerous. And sometimes all you need to do is produce maps, right? Produce like a PDF map or a sketch map of something of your site that you can just put into your site record or to your report.
00:34:54
Speaker
Can you talk a little bit about the, what is it called, the print templates that they have inside of there? I had a hell of a time trying to figure those out without any like tutorial information and the little widgets and stuff you put in there for the map and the other stuff and the things that you can do. Do you have any tips or tricks on how to just produce regular maps? Maybe I was even doing it wrong using those templates. I don't really know.
00:35:17
Speaker
some thoughts around that? Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, obviously, I think producing maps, that really is for archaeologists, it is in many ways, our bread and butter with GIS. Yeah. And I know that, you know, producing graphics, producing maps, it is like an order of GIS use that a lot of people, particularly like researchers or academics, you know, I say that as one,
00:35:42
Speaker
sort of look down on like, oh, it's so simple, you're just making a map. But it's probably, it's got to be three quarters or more of all archaeological use of GIS, right? Is producing for reports or public outreach, you name it, publications, right? So there is, you know, if you're familiar with Esri, and I'm talking about ArcGIS Desktop, but I think it's the same in Pro, you know, you've got sort of the, um,
00:36:08
Speaker
You've got like a map document and a layout view, I believe, or published review. I can't remember what it's called. It's like two little tabs that are hidden. Most people don't notice them until they need to, but in QGIS, it does. This is one of the differences between, I think the two ecosystems, right? You use what's called print layout and it operates in a very different way. It's, it's more like.
00:36:33
Speaker
If you would think of like the Adobe ecosystem where like maybe you use Adobe Photoshop to work on images, but then you use I'm blanking the.
00:36:45
Speaker
the Adobe program that you use to like layout of- Oh, Illustrator. Yes. Well, Illustrator, and yes, so right. So you're using, you know, if you're in the Adobe ecosystem, you're used to using, it's like design, what is it called? Anyway, you're using two or three programs to manipulate images, manipulate vector drawings, and then put that all together in a nice publication. Even if you're in Windows, you're still doing it. Maybe you're working in,
00:37:12
Speaker
you know, word and publisher or something else. So if you're coming from, you know, a software ecosystem that has multiple programs to handle different things, this is where you'll feel more comfortable in QGIS because it's almost like using a completely different program
00:37:29
Speaker
to create your maps. And I do have a video in that playlist is called creating maps with QGIS. And then in parentheses, it says print layout. And I go through all of the functions of print layout. And honestly, there was a time, you know, I do a lot of contract work, either for state grants or federal grants, or even, you know, private agencies or private groups, companies. That's what they're called.
00:37:55
Speaker
And at one point, sort of mid-report, I remember this for the state. I was doing for the state of Florida because we had a grant for one of our projects. This was years ago. And I say we, I mean, I had this through UCF, University of Central Florida, where I used to work.
00:38:09
Speaker
And so I switched actually halfway through that report preparation and I was able to mimic perfectly my ArcGIS maps and set them up in a print layout. So now, you know, again, for me.
00:38:28
Speaker
I would say that QGIS can do probably 90% of what CRM folks need to do out of the box, access data, symbolize data, put it into a map, print those maps out, stick it in a report, and a few other things.
00:38:43
Speaker
So yeah, print layout, if you're coming from Esring, it's confusing. If you're like, you've never used GIS and you can find a good tutorial, I think it becomes much easier to make sense of that. And so I do have that, it's part of the playlist, we'll link below or in the description, but yeah.
00:39:01
Speaker
Okay. Well, speaking of that, we will link to all of this, including your detailed YouTube videos on doing every single one of the things that we talked about and a heck of a lot more. But in the last few minutes of this podcast, is there anything we didn't mention that we just need to get out there for novices? I wouldn't say novices in GIS, but people new to QGIS that you'd like them to know before we end the show?
00:39:23
Speaker
You know, I think maybe the best thing that anybody can say to anyone else about using a new program or a new technology is, and we talked about it last week, but you know, don't be afraid to F it up. Don't be afraid to abandon a QGIS map document and start over.
Encouragement for QGIS Beginners
00:39:44
Speaker
Everyone who spent more than one semester
00:39:47
Speaker
or more than a few months using Esri products, knows the importance of walking away from something, either for a few moments or completely and starting from scratch. And I would say, give yourself permission to F it up.
00:40:03
Speaker
Okay. Well, that is some really good advice. And again, check out the links in the show notes for all this. It's a lot of really good information and it's really valuable stuff to know. Even if you're not a GIS person, it really helps you to know, especially when you can download something like this and you can play with it for free. You know, you can download those base maps, you can
00:40:22
Speaker
You can just play around and have fun with it. And that will allow you as an archaeologist to really understand what your GIS department has to deal with if you understand how to give them good data and how to play with that kind of stuff. And if you have a common frame of reference over what you're collecting and what they're dealing with, I think even from that standpoint, it's good to really understand all this. So it's free. Go download the thing. Go watch Ed's YouTube videos and be smarter for it. All right.
00:40:52
Speaker
Well, I think with that, I'm just going to mention one time as this episode is being released, we released a special episode of the CRM archaeology podcast last week. And it was in response to the young woman who died actually in Louisiana on her very first day of fieldwork. And we don't know if it was heat related, but the heat index was 107.
00:41:11
Speaker
And, you know, it just said she had a sudden medical event. But we recorded a special episode with some professionals in CRM talking about nothing about that company or her circumstance, but talking about knowing your limits, when to say when, you know, knowing you brought this up to me, it's actually admitting that you can fail at something and saying, listen, this is too much for me right now or this situation or something like that. And I just want to point that out on this podcast because there's a lot of archaeologists and heck, a lot of people.
00:41:37
Speaker
that listen to this, that might be in a similar situation. It's okay to back away and admit that you just can't do it and you need to move on to something else or speak up and try to get some assistance from the company you're working for. So I just wanted to acknowledge that and go find that episode. There's no ads on it. There's no anything. And it's a nice long discussion of us just talking about this stuff. So share it with somebody who needs to hear it.
00:41:59
Speaker
I think with that, Ed, thank you very much. I don't know if Paul's going to be on next time. We might have you for one more round. That'd be great. Yeah, indeed. And if you guys are liking these episodes, please send us some feedback. Send Ed some love and we'll see what we can talk about next time. If you guys have any suggestions, let us know. We have a lot we can talk about, but we're always happy to take audience suggestions. So with that, I think we'll say goodbye and we'll see you in two weeks.
00:42:29
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archaeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash archaeotech. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paul at lugall.com. Support the show by becoming a member at archpodnet.com slash members. The music is a song called Off Road and is licensed free from Apple. Thanks for listening.
00:42:55
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, Dig Tech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:43:22
Speaker
This is Chris Webster, founder of the APN and one of the chief editors. Thanks for listening all the way to the end. If you want to keep the conversation going and support us along the way, go to arcpodnet.com slash members. That's arcpodnet.com slash members. And thanks for listening.