Home > Harvard Map Collection > GIS Tutorials and Exercises

GIS Tutorials and Exercises

Introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Tutorial

The Introduction to GIS Tutorial consists of a three-part movie accompanied by hands-on exercises.

These tutorials require the Flash Player browser plugin.

• Introduction to GIS Part 1
• Introduction to GIS Part 2
• Introduction to GIS Part 3

Web resources mentioned during the movie are available at GIS Links and Resources.

Exercises
The exercises accompanying the movie are compressed into a ZIP file. To work with the exercises:

1. Make sure that you have the program ArcGIS, which is required to do the exercises. ArcGIS is available from the Harvard GSD Web site's Harvard ArcGIS/ArcView Download Page. License information is available at Harvard University Site Licenses for GIS.
2. Download the exercises from IntroToGIS.zip
3. Unzip the files into your local c:\temp directory, where two two folders will be created. The "workshop" folder contains the exercise data, and the "instructions" folder contains PDF instructions to lead you through the exercises.
4. Complete Exercise 1 after Part 1 of the movie.
5. Complete Exercise 2 after Part 2 of the movie.
6. Complete Exercises 3 and 4 midway through Part 3 of the movie when prompted to do so.