I charted the five places I visit most: West Gym, the CMC, Sayles-Hill, Davis Hall, and Willis Hall. I added a “days per week” column so point size would indicate how often I’m at each place. The biggest dot is Davis Hall, which tells you more about my schedule than any list. I traced the footprint of each building as a polygon and labeled the points so the map would read without clicking.
View my location spreadsheet or open the full map.
Building it showed me how many choices a ‘simple’ map hides. I picked the five spots, counted the hours by hand and sketched the outlines by eye, so the footprints are approximate. A reader sees clean shapes and assumes precision that is not there.
This was fast with ArcGIS Online. Dropping in a CSV got the points on the map in seconds. The size symbology was two clicks. That speed lets a historian test a pattern spatially before investing in full GIS for DH work. The trade-off is cost vs. control. ArcGIS is proprietary; Carleton pays to access it, and the map lives on Esri’s servers, not mine.
Hi George. I am having some slight trouble in trying to view your map. I greatly appreciate your inclusion of a direct link to the app — as it inspired me to add a direct link as well — however, there seems to be some trouble loading your map there as well. Going off of your descriptions, I would agree with you about the utility and ease-of-use of ArcGIS. I can see this kind of software being used in a variety of spaces from history to modern political science. It sounds as though you were a bit surprised by the amount of options we as creators have in building our maps: I concur with this sentiment. Even as we create these pieces digitally, it still comes to us to imagine how a viewer would best interpret the meaning we are trying to convey.