Lab Week 6 –

For the week 6 lab I wanted to outline the places and paths I most frequent at Carleton this term. In the map I labeled 5 locations, Laird Stadium, Weitz, Evans, LDC, and the Rec center. Through my class and baseball activities these are the most frequented locations for me this term. I also outlined the paths that I usually take to get too and from these places.

Regarding the decisions I had to make while creating app, they we not all that hard. Due to the fact I decided to pick locations in my schedule, deciding which builds, paths, and data to unclude was easy. Making the map was also way easier than I thought it was going to be. The application to build these visuals are very daunting and have a lot of features. Due to this, I thought that I would be difficult to create each layer and then combine them later. As it turns out this whole process was quite intuitive. The only thing that I struggled with was outlining the buildings. Initially, I didn’t understand how the polygon tool worked, this made me create multiple separate polygons to outline each building. Later I realized I could simply click each corner of the building and the polygon would fit perfectly in the end. You can see this difference when looking at LDC, and the Rec center in the picture below.

I would have liked to make an interactive viewer but it would prompt a sign-up in the embedded viewer with no input. If you want to check the out the interactive map you can go here. https://carleton.maps.arcgis.com/apps/instant/basic/index.html?appid=fb6bad436b35451daa29322a576d1f15. Similarly if you would like to check out the data I used you can go here. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sDreRrZFBx8HxR8Dd2oLdtBddG492WPlA3l9bsODpGk/edit?usp=sharing. In the interactive viewer you are able to click each building and get meta data about the building. The you can also zoom in and see a more close in look of the paths I take. (Don’t stalk me)

I think that this software has a lot of potential and is applicable in many senarios. I can invision a lot of DH related projects in which traditional visualization technices would not be applicable or strong enough. arcGIS has found a sweet spot of offering many tools and options while still being approachable and usable by less experience creators. It is also great that you are able to export your projects to apps. This allows the data to be quickly packaged and distributed easly in a multitude of formates depending on your needs. Going forward any time that I need a geographic based visualization I will took to arcGIS as a potential solution.