Lab 5: Web Mapping Carleton with ArcGIS

I found making a web map an fascinating process as I experimented with the various different functions ArcGIS had to offer. With basic information of five campus locations listed in this spreadsheet, I was able to mark them on top of a basemap, tracing my footprints across the College. The basemap I picked was OpenStreetMap, which created a clear delineation of the community using vivid color chunks and detailed the names of buildings and streets at the local level. Moreover, I liked how the basemap looked aesthetically compatible with my symbology. I labeled the individual buildings with unique symbols from the “Points of Interest” collection in the Change Style Function, which reflected the specific Function/Type of each location. Anyone without any knowledge of what Carleton looks like can spot where I live, study, take classes, and go to practice at first glance. The sizes of the symbols were adjusted according to the relative frequency of my visits to these locations each week, so that the viewer could easily identify where I usually spend the most time on campus. Tweaking the transparency allowed the location labels from the original basemap to show under the additional polygon feature layer I created. However, I failed to find a way to separately display the building images copied from the campus map in their corresponding pop-ups instead of showing the whole set of pictures in every single pop-up.

I am confident that web mapping will assume an increasingly significant and prevalent role in the promotion of DH projects—especially those involving spatial analysis. From a disciplinary perspective, web mapping itself embodies a great part of what DH is. While the data range from geological history to population demographics from all kinds of humanistic inquiries, the digital element involves representing such information through code, algorithms, and computations on cloud-based maps. Because these web maps are easily accessible online, they promote the distribution, understanding, and appreciation of DH work among a greater general audience than verbose texts do. Web maps enable people to see the geographical layout of surrounding communities closely relevant to everyday activities and to make connections with the larger geo-political background by zooming in and out, developing a sense of distance and space on different scales. Furthermore, access to web mapping tools such as ArcGIS allows for timeless, boundless collaboration across generations of contributors DH. Compared to traditional mapping on paper, web mapping entails an unprecedented level of interactivity between the creator and the viewer. Viewers can self-select what information is visible and what to hide on the interface, essentially creating multiple different maps within one embedded window. As viewers direct themselves through the various information provided by the mapper and piece together all the information at their own pace, they naturally gather their own interpretations of what is conveyed. This fosters intellectual relationships between the giving and receiving ends of the DH community.

I think the most tangible power of ArcGIS lies in its data visualization tools. It is extremely helpful that the platform is able to directly translate large amounts of data from a .csv file—both numerical and categorical—to geographical features and plot them on the basemap. Similar to geo-referencing platforms, ArcGIS also supports overlaying recreated layers on a basemap, but in a way that pinpoints particularly small, easily neglected elements instead of covering the original portrayal of the landscape. Most importantly, ArcGIS allows creators to save their mapping work on the cloud database and share it with their groups and organization. In this way, everyone is equipped to reference and even incorporate published feature layers to build constructively on each other’s work. Large quantities of DH data can also be preserved.