Computing, GIS and Archaeology in the UK

If you need almost-free contour data, for broad-scale maps showing the terrain of an area, and you live in the UK, then the Scottish Mountaineering Club have kindly provided data in Garmin IMG format on their website. To convert this into other GIS formats, then there is a programme called GPSMapEdit, which is shareware but quite useful. Paying for the software unlocks an option to convert to mapinfo, and from there the world of GIS is your proverbial oyster.

On my new tips and tricks page, I have included some step by step instructions for getting this data properly projected in British National Grid format in ArcMap, and how to interpret the results (not as simple as it sounds).

Having rearranged things at Archaeogeek Towers I appear to have lost the page where I showed how to use the data once you’ve got it into GPSMapEdit, so I will try and redress that asap.

Now, this data is not error free, as the authors freely admit, but it’s good for nice relief maps showing the basic terrain of an area. If anyone knows of other methods of getting this kind of data, then I’d love to here about it- leave me a comment!

James Fee’s Spatially Adjusted Blog has a mighty useful post on it today- an updated list of his feeds, including GIS Blogs, ESRI-specific Blogs and other GIS Sites. Most of these are aggregated in Planet Geospatial (probably the most useful GIS Link you’ll ever need) but some are not. Best of all, he’s included the opml files for easy rss integration.

Wordpress is now set up on my new domain www.archaeogeek.com, so this will be my last post from this wordpress.com hosted blog. Next job is to export the existing posts to the new domain, then the new feed should be available at www.archaeogeek.com/blog/?feed=rss (or rss2 etc, hopefully). I’m going to try and set it up to forward the old address, but in the mean time if you’d like to keep subscribing, that’s the way to go…

See you over in the new blog!

I’m going to be moving away from a wordpress.com hosted blog in the next few days. I’d like more flexibility with the layout, and I’ve been playing with some cool mapping that I would like to be able to show- what’s the point in blogging about it if I can’t actually let anyone see it!

So, this is a three step process. I’ve got to install wordpress on my shiny new www.archaeogeek.com domain, then import my existing posts into it. Then it’s a case of getting people to change their feed addresses, unless there’s a clever way of doing that…