For this week’s lab assignment, we used ArcGIS to map the route our group’s artifact took from its location of origin, to sale, to importation, to gift, and finally, to destination. You can view our web map app below!
Decisions made in the process
When we were making our map, we were challenged with a few different decisions. We had to decide which icons would best represent all of the stops on our artifact’s journey (origin, sale, importation, gift, and destination). We also had to decide how to best represent the location of our object’s origin on the map because the data given to us was too broad and didn’t pinpoint an exact location. Rather, it gave us the culture that the object came from. After some research about the Majiayao culture, our group chose a city that the culture encompassed as our origin point on the map.
Potential of web mapping for DH and ArcGIS
I think web mapping has a ton of potential in the DH field. The ability to visualize movement across space is a really powerful skill and is essential to many forms of storytelling, especially storytelling related to history and changes in global affairs. Web mapping also makes information more digestible and understandable to the viewer, making the information more accessible to a wider variety of people. Lastly, exploring web maps is fun and is more engaging than hearing a lecture or reading a textbook!
ArcGIS specifically has a lot of potential, too. Although even the web interface is not the most intuitive, the level of detail and analysis that ArcGIS provides is super helpful for creating meaningful maps that tell stories about a region. The versatility of ArcGIS should be mentioned, too. ArcGIS can map a multitude of different data sets (like topography, temperature, population, heat, etc.), and this variety lends itself to ArcGIS being applicable in many different analyses.
2 thoughts on “[Lab #6] Web Mapping Our Object’s Provenance”
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This is really cool! And you did a much better at embedding them me it appears! I am still trying to figure it out! The object you picked was really cool and I really loved how you used GIS to display how it got to Carleton. I also agree it is hard to decide the exact point when that data is not given.
Your map is made very well! I really like your decision to pick a city that you felt best represented where the object came from; our object had an unknown importation location so we omitted the point, but this feels like a more elegant workaround. I agree that ArcGIS is a very helpful tool, despite the setbacks it has from its unintuitive interface. Great post!