With my group members, we made a website that holds an interactive map of all the places the Horse and Rider statue has traveled between its origin in the Han Dynasty and Carleton’s museum. I found the process for this to be very challenging and difficult to sort through. It ended up being a lot of trial and error for me when I tried following the instructions on creating a map in ArcGIS. The first issue I ran into was trying to make the image of the artwork a logo for the locations in Asia. We ended up deciding to differentiate its origins using this logo, and a start to show the other locations. I noticed when I look back at the map how it looks a little bit funky when the logos don’t show at the fully zoomed out level, but they looked too on top of each other when they were able to be seen at that zoom level. I wonder if there is a way to have the logo shrink as the map gets zoomed out in order to avoid this problem.
Another issue I ran into was remembering how to add the lines. This was an easier technique once I remembered the layer we had already created. However, when I look at the details in terms of the lines I realize that in my beginner levels, they are not the most accurate lines when they are zoomed in. I would love to hear advice on how I can make sure that the lines I draw can be straight between two points so far away.
In the future, I would also like to learn techniques to be able to make a map that shows the lines drawn over time. That way there could be a timeline at the bottom that would show where the sculpture was traveling and when it was happening. That would just add an interesting perspective on top of what we are able to do now.
4 thoughts on “ArcGIS Mapping: Beginner Reflection”
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
We too ran into an issue with drawing the lines. When we finally remembered how to draw them, we also had issues with making the lines perfectly accurate like we wanted. I also really like your idea of adding a timeline feature to these projects. Though they may not be as effective with maps with a few stops, other artifacts have travelled frequently and it would be easier to interpret the map with a timeline rather than a map filled with lines and different pins.
I agree that I think that having a timeline feature for the lines would have been amazing to have. My group was trying to play around in the ArcGIS website to try to figure out how to do that as well, but sadly could not figure anything out and abandoned the idea. Especially for more storied objects it would provide another way to better visualize the object’s story.
Great work, Maya! You and your group made a really cool map. My group and I also ran into some issues with drawing lines, it takes a bit of trial and error to get what you really want but I think they turned out really well in the end. I definitely think it would be really helpful to add a line option that allows you to show a time and date over the line. Having even just a timeline at the bottom would be a huge boon for interpreting maps.
It seems you ran into a lot of the same issues my group did, especially with the lines. We aren’t sure if we did it correctly, but our map does show the lines we drew; we used the “Sketch” tool (button? layer? idk) to draw out our lines, but there was one big pro and one looming con. The pro is that the tool snapped to each location we’d already created, so we didn’t need to eyeball it and create a line that meagerly passed through the locations, but one that connected each of our predetermined locations. The con was that we made the assumption our figure traveled over the Pacific Ocean from Hong Kong to California, so we tried to make our line go in this direction, but whenever it auto-snapped on the California stop (or any of the points in America for that matter), our line was redirected Westward through the rest of Asia, over Northern Africa, the Atlantic Ocean, and the rest of America to California. We could not figure out a way of getting around this, and we deliberately wanted our line to go Eastward, so we had to zoom in really close to the points and drop our line right next to the stops. All in all, yes, a challenging process, but your map looks great and I’m glad everything else got figured out along the way!