GIS (Digital Mapping)
What Is GIS
Esri
UWGB
American Digital Cartography
Graef, Anhalt, Schloemer
Earth Tech
McMahon
Menominee Indian Tribe of WI
UWGB
A New Start
AS part of the VA after leaving the Air Force, I was given vocational rehabilitation and the opportunity to get a college degree. As I was living at home, it was natural to select the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay (UWGB).Cartography and GIS
Everything with GIS and me started at UWGB, in the Cartography Lab. Having many Geography related classes and taking the Cartography class, a group of us took over the Cart lab, making it our home for studying, eating, and generally hanging out.My very first mapping job was created by Bill Laatsch when he was contacted by Schneider International (trucking firm) if he knew anyone with mapping skills and recommended me. It was a simple job, I was given a Architectual E-size County-wide United States map and using about 5 colored pencils I had to color each county and not have 2 colors touching county borders. The colors didn't mean anything, just created uniqueness. I know there were some areas where it was difficult to not have two coincident counties use the same color. I do not have any images of this map and I am sure it was tossed a long time ago.
While I started out in Cartography using pen and ink, in the next room was one PC computer that nobody used. On it was a GIS program called ARC/INFO 3.5 (from a company then called ESRI) and had a very large digitizing tablet attached. I asked if I could learn the software and use it create an Independent Study class. With Bill Niedzwiedz's permission, I started developing the skills to use the software and contacted the Village of Ashwaubenon to get a copy of their parcel map. My first job was to create the GIS parcel data by using a cursor/puck, which looked like a small mouse but had a transparent window with crosshairs for pinpointing exact intersections. You would line up the crosshair with say the corner of the parcel and click button on cursor.
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Bay-Lake Regional Planning Commission
While working with the GIS software at UWGB, I was also doing an internship with Bay-Lake Regional Planning Commission (BLRPC) under Mark Walter. When I first started at BLRPC I also was using pen and ink on mylar to create and update maps. Another responsiblity was created copies of large maps using a diazo copy machine (blueprints), taking the original mylar print and blueprint paper and feeding into a machine that made a copy. The process used some type of chemical and I remember having to lick my fingers to get the paper fed into the machine right and after a day of doing this having a very numb mouth.One project that I did, I created a large scale map of Brown County using 1:24,000 scale USGS Topographic maps. I started with the South-East map, tracing all the line features (except the contour lines) onto a mylar overlay. After completing each map, I would have to line up the ajoining map as best as possible to make every map edgematched. I did this on two 36-inch mylar sheets and then had them "joined" and reduced in scale so we could make copies in the office.
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At some point Bay-Lake decided to upgrade mapping to GIS and purchased PC ARC/INFO 3.5 (a version more integrated with Windows), but very buggy. It was fortunate that it was the same GIS that I was using at UWGB, so I was able to keep learning. The one important thing I was able to learn having had to edit old mylar maps and when they were erased too many times you had to recreate the map, but with GIS everything was digital so it was easy to edit maps.
Unfortunately, the intership ended in May 1991 and I graduated from UWGB with two majors, Regional Analysis (Emphasizing in Land Use Planning) and Geography, but that same month was able to start at Geographic Systems Corporation (GSC) and subsidiary of WPS. I worked with Bruce Baikke and John Bourguignon (who happened to be the brother of my cousins (Debbie) husband). I was mainly hired to help John work on the Oconto County Land Records Modernization Plan, but was trying to get involved in GSC's GIS program based IBM's Geographic Facilities Information System (GFIS). I only lasted until November of 1991 and needed to move on see about a career.
It didn't take that long and it was on to ADC.