Lost in GIS … Again

Struggling still to understand geographical information and learn how to do things with it, I had high hopes for this tutorial, even though it dates from 2017. Reading through it a couple of times, before trying to do anything, it seemed to contain the sort of information I wanted to be able to use. So I carved out a few hours and started to work through it. There were plenty of errors to begin with of a sort I have become familiar with, that various bits and pieces could not be found. One proved absolutely insoluble, and I reasoned that perhaps I was using too modern a version of Python. So I went back to square one and installed Python 3.6.

That got me over that obstacle, but quickly landed me in front of another. This time I seem unable to do anything.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
ModuleNotFoundError                       Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-9-4c50f0c278a2> in <module>
----> 1 import geojsonio
      2 geojsonio.display(states)

ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'geojsonio’

But I know geojsonio is in there somewhere. I can see it at ~/opt/anaconda3/pkgs/ But for some reason, the Notebook I am working from cannot find it. Which is, y'know, infuriating.

So, as ever, I turned to my friends on IndieWeb chat for help, and they did, by pointing me in the right direction.

I was shown how to use

import sys
sys.path

to see what was going on, and then I could check and discover that the module was not present in the specific environment I had set up. This page — Installing Python Packages from a Jupyter Notebook — showed me in detail what to do and offered explanations that went mostly over my head.

In the end, from Jupyter, I created a new Notebook and used it to install the module.

import sys
!conda install --yes --prefix {sys.prefix} -c conda-forge geojsonio

And it worked. In that Notebook. And in the tutorial Notebook, all was well. I zipped through to the end, saw what was possible, and will return to think more deeply another time.