I changed the symbology from the default circular points to the diamonds as I thought they looked nicer and reminded me of the triangles on maps that indicated ‘you are here’. I feel the shading and highlights on the default points are distracting, especially since the rest of the map does not have shading or highlights as well. I then made the opacity of the diamonds different depending on the frequency of visits to the building per week. Lower opacity indicated less frequent visits and higher opacity indicated more visits. The least visited buildings had three visits per week and the one building with the most visits had seven visits each week. That one building was my dorm building.
This could be used to track the frequency of occurrences at locations in general and could also be used to show population changes and migration patterns. I think it would be especially fun to see something similar to the squirrel mapping in class done for Carleton. It would be cute to use it to track the movements and patterns of Albs, the campus Albino squirrel. I have also heard some other students say there are actually multiple albino squirrels on campus. A mapping project could be used to confirm or deny this.
Both of my other classes also relate to letters. I think it would be interesting to see the path of these correspondences in space on a map. One of the classes I’m in is currently looking at the letters of Emily Dickinson, and some of her letters were edited and published posthumously. One of the edits made to these letters was changing the names of who these letters were addressed to. This was proven by examining the letters and finding where the names were erased and rewritten; I think it would be interesting to have the addresses of the letters tracked and mapped as an additional level of proof.
