Guidelines and Techniques for Analytical Documentation

Developing a capacity to compile, produce, evaluate, and share information is one goal of a university education. The following Design School courses: Fundamentals of GIS, Site Systems Representation I and Site Systems Representation II are each geared to representing places and scenarios using data, and evaluating these representations as models that more or less improve our understanding of a particular aspect of a place. In this endeavor there are three important things to learn and to demonstrate:

• How do we find or create information that will help us to understand our site better.
• How do we combine data with procedures in order to reveal something specific something specific about a place?
• How should we present our models and maps to others so that they understand the specific aspects of a place that we feel are important?
• How should we evaluate the performance and strengths, weaknesses and and biases of a digital model with regard to a specific purpose?
• How do we archive digital models and data so that they can be used by our colleagues and clients?

For each course, students will prepare a database and some analytical models. In the course of the term, each student will prepare a portfolio documenting his or her work, and will prepare an archive of data that is documented well enough to be shared and re-used by other scholars or designers. Each assignment will provide the basis for a draft installment in the portfolio and some entries to the on-going data archive. The final project for each course will clean up and tie together these installments into a single portfolio document with a data archive to be submitted on a CD.

The page you are reading provides guidelines and techniques for documenting and evaluating digital representations. The guidelines are divided into two parts:

• Portfolio Content Guidelines, specifying the questions that should be addressed by the overall portfolio and in the documentation for each exercise;
• Technical Guidelines and Tips for Portfolios; which state the format and file-size requirements for the portfolio and individual assignments.

These guidelines will be useful for any of your professional or scholarly work; in the context of the aforementioned GSD classes, your grades will suffer markedly if you fail to follow them.

Specific standards for documenting sites and their context, are coverd in this web page:

• Elements of Cartographic Style specifies the minimum requirements for documenting a site and its context.

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Portfolio Content Standards

The purpose of your work in any of the GSD's Digital Representation classes is to demonstrate a high level of scholarship and professionalism in handling digital information. We presume that in your postgraduate life you will either be a producer, compiler, or a consumer of digital information and analysis. In any case, you should be able to evaluate the work of information handlers and analysts; and what better way to prove this ability than by acting as producer and critical evaluator of your own work!

From another angle, your instructor has to evaluate many, many such demonstrations. It is best for all concerned to spell out specific formal goals in advance so that you, the student can concentrate on these, and avoid spending time on things that aren't important. These guidelines may not be exactly what you should expect from clients in the field, but in the absense of any other specification for documentation analytical work, these guidelines should be adequate.

Portfolio Document Structure Though your portfolio will be completed in installments, keep in mind that it will be compiled and graded as a single document. Each portfolio should have the following structure:

1. Context: A introduction that states the context of the explorations being presented. What are the ideas that are being explored, and why? It is nice if you can contrive interesting reasons for exercises, but if you can't it will suffice to explain that they are for a class.
2. If all of your explorations deal with a single place, then your introduction should include context maps.
3. Sections: The body of the portfolio will consist of a series of demonstrations. It is nice to include a table of contents. A formal guideline for each demonstration is discussed below.
4. Data Archive The portfolio is presented with a CD archive of the data that was used, or created for, the demonstrations. The portfolio document should note that the data are available on the accompanying CD. The data archive should fit on one single CD, and should be organized according to the style reccomentsed in the tutorial, Beginning your Place Based Data Collection

Guidelines for Portfolio Sections Each installment in your portfolio is the product of a single assignment, and will in general present a single representational product. There may be specific content requirements specified for particular assignments, but in general each installment should include the following elements:

1. Statement of Goals: Each section of your portfolio presents a representation that was made for a specific purpose. It is important to state the purpose to give meaning to the work and to provide a reference against which the work can be evaluated, and a rationale for the various technical choices that were made in building it.
2. Presentation of the work: Of course, you need to show images of the work itself, with captions and annotations that call attention to the important details. You should show any intermediate products that will be useful for understanding critical stages in genesis of your representation.
3. Critical Discussion: Every model is imperfect. The important questions for the analyst and the client are: is the model useful for the purposes at hand? Considering the compoents: the data, or the procedures used, can we predict the most substantial shortcomings of the model, and the effect that they are likely to have on our analysis? How might the model be improved? THis critical commentary is not required for basic context maps unless there is clearly something questionable about the data that is used.

Technical Standards and Tips

Handling, remarking upon and archiving document submissions from a class full of students can be problematic when the documents are technically awkward. As a student, or as a professional analyst, you should endeavor to make sure that your documentation is stable and streamlined and that it isn't frustrating for your client to handle.

Final Format:The documents should be submitted in Adobe PDF format so that they can be opened in the Acrobat viewer which has no risk of modifying the document or passing macro viruses. unless noted otherwise, all documents should be formatted for an 8"x11" page so that they are easily viewed on a computer screen or printed out. In general, you can expect that your work will be viewed on-line, so it is OK to include animations or other hypermedia. Landscape format is better suited to on-screen viewing than portrait.

Keep images and text next to eachother. Your project will be evaluated on how well your images and text support eachother. So make it easy and put your related text and images next to eachother on the same page.

Single PFD Document, Multiple Pages It is important that each assignment be submitted as a single, complete document file. It is very aggravating to have to open up several files just to evaluate a single project! Your individual draft installments, of course will be uploaded as individual files and may be reviewed in the course of the term, but at mid-term and the end of the semester, students will be responsible for pulling the installments together into a single document.

Keep Backups of your Data and Documents Be sure to save your intermediate data files, models and draft documents so that you can make suggested revisions for the final! Ib case the instructor's copy of your project is lost. You will be responsible for being able to proivide another copy.

Production: If you are good with desktop publishing tools you may not need any tips on producing a good document with graphics and text. To

A very good method for producing illustrated, annotated PDF documents is to compose them in Microsoft Word, and then to print them as Adobe Acrobat files. This requires that you have MS Word and the full version of Acrobat installed on your computer. These packages should be installed on all of the public computers in Gund Hall. If you have your computer on the GSD network, you can install Acrobat from the Public\Software directory.

Compiling a PDF Using Acrobat Pro: The easiest approach to compiling a collection of maps and text into an acrobat document is to make your map layouts in ArcMap with text on them and export these as pdf files. Then you can make your title page in MS word, and

Submit files through courseware It is very difficult to keep track of random files submitted on CD or attached to email messages. Unless otherwise noted, all assignments should be submitted to courseware using the link provided on the assignment page. Beacuse space in the instructor's email inbox is limited, assignments submitted through email may be completely disregarded.

File Size: one of the biggest problems with accepting digital homework submissions is that space is limited, and it is easy to produce documents that are so large that a single student can swamp the upload directory. As a general rule, A PDF document for any assignment should be no larger than 20 megabytes, or 2 megabytes per page. If your document exeeds this limit, you may want to use the PDF Optimizer tool under the Advanced menu in Acrobat 6. If your document is larger than 25 megabytes, go ahead and submit it, but email the instructor with an explanation of the technique you used to create the file. If your file is greater than 70 megabytes, do not submit the file, rather reformat the file using exported or screen-captured images placed in a Word document and print to pdf.

Image Export: For capturing images from various programs, you should consult the soecific documentation for the program at hand. Here are some general hints, however: From ArcMap, it is best to create a layout that has its page setup adjusted to the dimensions you desire for your final illustration. Then export as an .emf or Encapsulated Meta File the advantage of this is that emf files can handle vector information so that the image can be zoomed into on the final pdf. Be careful though, because too much detail in the layers that are turned on can result in a very large file. Make sure to switch off all layers that aren't important for your illustration.

Size Problems with EMF format exports If you have a problem making pdfs that are reasonably-sized (no larger than a few megabytes), it is likely that your emf files from arcmap have too much detail in them. If thisa is happening to you, you should either figure out hoe to simplify your maps in arcmap, or export your graphics as jpg files instead of emf format.

Font Problems: Another potential problem with pdf documents is that they may use fonts that are copyrighted and not included with the file. This is a bad problem since the file will reference the fonts from your computer and will look fine, until it is viewed on a computer that does not have your special fonts. To check this in acrobat , turn off Advanced->Use Local Fonts to see what your file will look like if it depends only on the fonts imbedded in the document.

Export a JPEG --The safe way to put graphics in your document Considering all of the potential gotchas with exporting graphics as emf, you may want to simply export your graphics as jpg. When you do this, just make sure you adjust the options for DPI so that all of the important map detail is legible.

More ArcMap Tips it is common for people to have problems getting high resolution output from ArcMap. Keep in mind that your maps need to be legible at 8.5x11 format! This requires some experimentation. Please pay attention to the Image Quality settings in the Page-Setup dialog, and the Options dialogs available in most of the the various export dialogs. People sometimes like to export PDFs directly out of ArcMap or Adobe Illustrator, to import and compose using Acrobat. This results in very high-resolution output AND files that are much larger than they ought to be.

Screen Capture there are some situations when you need to capture an image of something on your screen, and the export functions of your software aren't any help. This is particularly true when you need to show a part of the software interface, such as a menu or a dialog box. In cases such as these, you can always capture an image of your screen with the Prinscreen button. Consult your operating system help documentation for details on how this works. Once captured, the image can be pasted into your word document and cropped apropriately using word's image formatting tools. If you do a lot of screen capturing, you may want to invest in a good shareware screen capture tool like Snagit.

Embedding Animations in a PDF Document: Animations can add a lot of information to a digital document using a very small amount of real-estate. Animations are particularly useful for showing the relationships among elements in a three dimensional scene. Click Here to view a pdf document with embedded animations -- including tips for creating your own!

Backups: it is the responsibility of each student to keep backup copies of all work until the final course grade has been issued. The instructor is not responsible for work that is permanently lost for any reason.