Digitizing in ArcMap (and Adding Labels to the Features)

hello everyone welcome to this tutorial on ArcGIS today I'll be showing you how to digitize various components of a map be the scan map or another type of a map and for this tutorial I'll be using an s3 based map so I have structured this tutorial into three different parts first I'll be showing you how to add a base map and then how to digitize and finally how to add labels to those components that you digitized so let's get started by opening arcmap and first I will show you how to add the base map you go to file add data and add base map here you see that we are presented with different types of map options so I'm going to go with imagery with labels option and you press ENTER over here alright once your base map is visible you can actually use to use the zoom in button to zoom into the area that you would like to digitize now I'll start digitizing you can see we have different types of components for example some lakes and some roads going around and we have some crop lens and we can see some urban areas with buildings so for this tutorial I'll get started by digitizing this big lake before that I mean you need to make sure that you have already created a folder where you're going to save all the generated shape files now after you have done that in one of your drives you can go to catalog and you can use this option of connect to a folder to actually make a link to the folder which you have already created and for my case you can see that in the D Drive I have created a folder called ArcGIS tutorial so I'm going to select that that and press ok so as you can see we already got the folder over here and this is the place where we are going to save our generated shapefiles okay I'm going to right click on this one go to new and create a new shapefile and I'm going to name this as lakes and under feature type you can see we get to see different types of features now for this tutorial I'm going to actually sort of draw polygon which is going to cover this whole lake so obviously the type of feature that we are going to work with right now for the legs is polygons and the spatial reference we have to define a coordinate system and I'm going to go with the standard WGS 1984 coordinate system for this tutorial and press ok all right now under the ArcGIS tutorial folder you can see that you can already see that we have gotten the lates shapefile so we can get started with digitizing now before that if you need to make sure that you have this editor panel already included in your window in case if you cannot see that you can right click over here in this area and then you can simply activate that editor panel then you go to editor and you start editing click clicks and continue and go to editor again go to editing windows create features so here we can see that the option legs is already visible and once you click on this one you can see that under the construction tool you have the option polygons so what I'm going to do is basically start drawing a polygon around the bit Blake by simply clicking over here and following along the the lake boundary I'm not going to demarcate the boundary and digitize it in a very precise manner because I'm doing this just for the purposes of demonstrating but in case if you need to do it in a more precise manner you can zoom it in and then digitize it in a more precise manner like so alright once you're done you can simply double-click to complete your polygon and as you can see we have successfully digitized our our first component that is the big leg I'm going to change the color of this polygon by simply clicking over here and selecting blue instead of green because it's more representative and I'm also going to digitize this small lake simply you start clicking adding points and connecting them through lines until you complete the polygon and double click to finish it and you can see we have successfully the digitized two of the lakes in our area next I want to make use of the polyline option as well so if you want to digitize maybe this road starting from here all the way up to here you can do it by using a polyline so how do you do that you can first go to editor and stop press stop editing and it's asking whether you want to save your edits of course yes and after that you can go to this catalog over here and you need to create a new shapefile because this shape file you created four legs and that consists of these two lakes which are polygons and now we are going to create a new shape file which has polylines so we go to we right click over here go to new and click on shapefile and this one I'm going to name it as roads and the feature type I'm sure by now you'll be able to identify that we are going to use polyline for this option and the coordinate system I'm going to stick to the same coordinate system which I used before WGS 1984 alright once you have it in place you could and start editing and now this time you're going to select roads and you go to a keen editor and editing windows create features and under create features now you can see actually we have an option for roads and once you click on this one you can see under the construction tools we have the option of selecting lines after then you can zoom in to the part where you want to digitize we simply click here and start drawing the line following the path of the road I'm going to digitize the other road as well this one all right we are done with digitizing two of the roads we go to editor and we stop editing and then we are going to save our edits as well however for roads I think you can see that it's not very clearly visible so I'm going to go to the symbology over here by clicking on this line and I will select this option expressway and probably change the color and then increase the width a little bit okay now you can see that it's much more representative alright that concludes the part of digitizing now we are going to move into the part of adding labels for example if this leg had a particular name and then this small also had a particular name and if you want to get that name displayed in this map that's what we are going to actually do in in our last step and similarly if you wanted to add some labels to these two roads as well and that's how I'm going to show you in this next step of adding labels first you go to roads and you open the attributes table now this attributes table is actually the table which contains all the information which corresponds to the features of this shapefile so if you want to add labels to these two roads you you also need to have those labels included first in the attributes table as well so if you want your polylines to have unique names then what you need to do is you need to actually include those unique names in this attributes table as well in a new column so as you can see here we have three columns the field ID shape and ID and none of the columns actually represent the name of each of these roads so that's we are going to do we are going to create a new column over here but before that you need to make sure that you have exited the editor mode because if you're still in the editing mode then arcmap will not allow you to create a new column so once you have exited the editor mode go here or you go over here and select add field and here we give the name of the column I'm going to name it as Road name's and under the type you have different types for example in the column if you are going to enter some digits with our decimal points you you can either either choose short integer or long integer and if you have some number some numbers with decimal points you can either go with float or double but in this case I'm actually going to enter the name so that's the text so I'm going to choose this one text and you can see that we have gotten our road names column already and in this cell you need to include the name of the road so but if you double click over here you can see that it's good it's kind of block blocked it's kind of locked so how do you unlock that you need to go to editor and you need to start editing again which means that you're going to the editor mode again and you have to click on roads and press Continue and I'm going to highlight this cell because just just because I want to see which road gets represented by this row and this one I'm going to just give an arbitrary name called east-west highway and for the other the second road I'm going to name it as north-south highway alright once you're done with that you can simply go to editor and stop editing and save your edits and then you can go to roads and go to properties and make sure you are in the labels tab here you can activate the label features in this layer option and under the label field you have to make sure that you have selected the column which contains the names that you that you just give and these are some text options that you can see you can select different font and increase the the font size and you can change the font color if you wish and once you click apply you can see that you have already gotten the names for the two roads that you already digitized now I'm going to do the same with the lakes as well I'm just going to give two names to the legs so first I'm going to open the attributes table and I will add a new column called Lake names and here I will select text and press ok and then I will go to the editor mode and start editing click lakes continue and when I highlight this row this zero field ID corresponds to this bigger lake and I'm going to name that Lake has length 1 and the second component corresponds to the small lake which I'm going to name as leg 2 once you're done you can simply go to editor and stop editing and save edits and repeat the same step that we did in the previous one go to labels and make sure you have label features in this layer ticked in and under the label field you're going to select the column name which you just created and maybe select a different font color increase the font size a little bit press apply and you can see that we already have gotten the labels for the lakes as well so that concludes the tutorial for today so if you enjoyed today's tutorial you can give it a thumbs up and if you would like to see more tutorials like this on ArcGIS as well as Python programming be doing a series of videos in the upcoming weeks and you can definitely consider subscribing as well thank you very much

Channel: GeoDelta Labs

Views: 20,179

Rating: 4.9694657 out of 5

Keywords: Basic Digitizing, ArcGIS, ArcMap, ESRI, Basemap, Shapefiles, GIS, Creating shapefiles, Digitizing polygons, Labeling features, Digitizing maps

Id: HktRckn2hRc

Length: 14min 7sec (847 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 06 2018