Introduction to Coding using Python

Nowadays, being efficient and creative in GIS/ci often involves being willing to experiment with code. There’s a lot of GIS that only exists in ‘libraries’ (akin to collections of ArcGIS tools) and a lot more that is possible once you can remix existing code and use it alongside GIS GUIs. This is not the same as software development–you’re not necessarily developing something general for others to use, you’re often solving a particular problem for an organization or yourself. This sort of knowledge of code for GIS and cartography even isn’t the same as learning code in the context of data science with aspatial types of data, as most data science courses are. There are overlaps with software development (or theoretical computer science) that you might get in a computer science department, and there are overlaps with what you might learn in data science. But there’s a lot that’s specific to GIS and the GIS community, and plenty of people who are successful in using code in GIS are even self-taught. Regardless, it’s a never-ending pursuit for anybody, as things always change, and ‘mastery’ is impossible–one builds up experiences and analogies and, above all, a willingness to experiment. In this lecture, we’ll build on the experiences you’ve had with ArcGIS Notebooks during the course, giving you a basic sense of some uses of code within GIS, focusing on Python and ArcGIS as someone doing GIS analyses might experience.

  • To be able to articulate some situations in which coding might be useful within GIS/cience.
  • To understand some of the ways that Python integrates into ArcGIS and other GIS GUI software platforms.
  • To be aware of Python's data wrangling, visualization and spatial data engineering capabilities.
  • To get a sense for ways in which one might pursue adding more code to one's own work.