Lab Week 6- Web Mapping

This week we were tasked with creating our own campus maps of locations we frequent. My map was created from a CSV file I made from a table in Google Sheets. I pretty much just went for the places I had class and my dorm. The only decisions I made were about the symbology of my map. I went for changing the size and color of the points based on how many times a week I visit these places. The bigger dots are the more visited places and the colors go from yellow to red based on the same metric. I just left the polygons of the building their default color to contrast with the points, but I did make them less opaque in order to see the points better. I labled each building as well. I left the pop-ups as they were, which on second thought I probably should’ve changed to be more informative than just the table of data. But alas, as I didn’t, here is the Web Map as it currently stands:

As someone who has done some work with ArcGIS for my work on a different Digital Humanities project, I sometimes find it to be really frustrating. While this was fairly easy to do and create, once things get more complex you start running into issues. Even doing the squirrel population map in class I ran into the issue of no longer being able to set the point symbology as images if it was in Unique Point mode. While we found a work around by going into MapViewer Classic, it just felt like something that should’ve been fairly easy to do. I do think that for beginners it’s easier to pick up than something like Leaflet maps which require a lot more actual coding skills to get started, so I think that for some projects ArcGIS works great, but other times it’s annoying to deal with the restrictions, especially of the online version compared to the desktop one. Though I do think that Web Mapping is a great tool to show spatial relationships in the humanities or change over time in a particular location, like we did with the georeferencing of historical maps on Tuesday.