Starting over

Working through all of my saved files, the only saved georeferenced shapefiles that i shapefiles have of my constituencies is incomplete. This means that I ahve to recreate EVERYTHING. It took me well north of 500 hours to accurately draw the shapes. I was mapping 1:10,00 scaleso thhat I could accurately get every field annd watercourse. Ths was perrhaps overkiut I wanted to be accuate as possible. Fortunately, as I noted in my article on creating the GIS, by the time that I had finished my work the Niedersachsen had published online a Geodata portal with many useful layers. Their 'Gemeinde" layer did me no good as the villages had passed through several consolidations since my era. They did, however, have layers for "Flur" and "Gemärkung". Using these, I am able to recreate the old constiuencie shapes although with less exactitude (1:50,000). I am maybe 1/4 of the way through. With luck, I will have sufficient time over spring breeak to comolete the task. I need it so that I can start analyzing Left Liberal voting patters.

QGIS solution

A week away, and works! Now to get to the spatial analysis! A preliminary look and things might not be quite what I expected, with the German Democrats early on doing less well in livestock areas than I had imagined.

QGIS frustrations

I haven‘t worke3d on the GIS portion of my work since 2021. In the interim, my old MacBook Pro was charged out for a new one that lacked Bootcamp of Parallels - programs that I needed to access te PC side of my machine, where I kept my GIS work. I neglected to have our computer folks back these up, so I am now trying to reconstruct them from Dropbox and G-drive saved files. What a mess. Complicating everything, QGIS has advanced, changed, whatever and I am struggling to learn the new terminology, etc. Grrr.