Hello and welcome. This course is all about data; how to find it, download it, work with it, prepare it for the way you want to use it, and then be able to map it. First, we'll talk about different types of files, such as shapefiles and geodatabases, so that when you're getting data from somewhere else or creating your own, you'll understand the implications of choosing different file formats, you'll learn how to find your own data and understand how to look at metadata, which is information about a data set and use that to evaluate the data, and make sure that it's appropriate for what you want to use it for. You'll learn how to prepare data sets by doing things like clipping out just the area that you want to keep out of a large dataset, or merging two different datasets to make one larger one. You'll learn how to geocode things such as street addresses, or postal codes, or even place names. Basically, the idea is taking anything that's not in a GIS format, like those, and converting them into coordinates that can be put on your map. You'll learn about fundamental map design principles such as color models, and visual hierarchy, and how to use contrasts effectively. You'll also learn about different map types such as, choropleth maps, dot maps and proportional symbols, and finally, you will complete a project which really focuses on data acquisition. You'll go and find data sets that you're interested in, that are appropriate for the kind of work that you want to do, download them, assess the metadata, and bring them into the GIS, and then start to work with them to create a quantitative map. I think you're going to find this course to be really interesting. It can be a little intimidating at first trying to find your own data and figure out what to do with it, but once you've completed this course, I hope that you'll find that it's not as hard as you think, and once you get to find data that you're interested in for your project, it's really a lot of fun.