Month: October 2014

Its here.

Midterms.

As the academic calendar continues to progress, midterms allow you the awareness of “further than we were, but not yet where we need to be” in classes and projects. The same mindset has been being applied to SIF as I had my first small group checkin yesterday. Myself, Ryan, Sruthi, Roxanne, and Valerie all met with Brennan to check in on project progress and the overall SIF experience so far. Because I had not not even met some of these SIFs before, (I’ll remind you that I was not at the SIF kick off meeting in August since I was still living in DC at the time) I really enjoyed that we got to spend a large portion of our time together simply sharing in detail who we are, what projects were were assigned to, and providing an overview of the details of each project and its current status. What was most enjoyable about this was, when these SIFs spoke about their roles and objectives, you could see their faces light up with excitement. And when you hear about their projects, it is easy to see why. My SIF colleagues are working on really meaningful projects that utilize technology in innovative ways. Ah ha. Just what we’ve been striving for all along. But that is my honest reflection towards these projects. People are excited about the work they are doing because it simultaneously interesting, challenging, and best of all-creating a useful end product.

This same theme was present in during the TEDxPeachtree event that I attended last Friday. There were four speaker sessions, each which had a different theme: Frontiers, The Lab, Sensory Percussion, and Play. My colleague, Thomas, also did a recent post about TED that you can refer to if you’re not familiar it. Innovators gathered at The Buckhead Theatre to share their tales about challenges and successes in projects ranging from fractal thinking and virtual reality to beatboxing and using scientific data about the sun for a public art installations.  As a person who’s spent more than their fare share of time on the web watching TEDx videos- I kind of knew what to expect from the presentations ; what I did not expect however, was that the 30 minute breaks in between each session would prove to be just as thought provoking as the presentations themselves.

During the breaks, people would flood into the lobby of the theatre and engage in rigorous dialogue inspired by the just ended session. Reflections and reactions were shared between people who (most of the time) had just met. Perspectives would collide and coalesce, ideas would proliferate, business cards were exchanged. The excitement and potential contained within the room was almost intoxicating. This visceral experience is the thing you miss when you interact with these ideas virtually-through videos and the comments section.

So with this in mind, I propose we explore the possibilities of organizing a type of SIF Symposium that would allow the Georgia State community to come and experience our excitement with us. I imagine SIFs doing pretensions in the CURVE space, specifically on the interactWall, and then during break times the SIFs of that session could possibly take a post at one of the collaboration stations where they can interact with interested members of the audience. These types of symposiums could increase innovative dialogue across campus and potentially spark collaborations where it may not have occurred before. This is crucial as it is only through creative and collaborative projects that we will begin to address the problems of the 21st century classroom.

I would like to begin a series of “Maps for the Classroom: How To” blog posts that will share with readers different tips, trips, and tools that educators can use with little to no training to visualize spatial data.

The first tool I would like to highlight is called BatchGeo. In CURVE this week, we had a student who came in and wanted to learn more about how to bring a spreadsheet of addresses into the ArcGIS environment. Well, as is not unusual for ArcMap, we ran into challenges when the geocode address tool kept giving us an error message. But never fear! BatchGeo is here!

BatchGeo is a website that generates point based maps from Excel spreadsheets.  Let me provide a little overview of the workflow this site:

First thing to do is organize your spreadsheet in a way that allows BatchGeo to “talk” to the information.  I suggest making column headers such as “Address” ,”City” ,”State” and “Zip Code”. You can also add additional information (some examples may be the name of the location or contact information for a business you’re representing)-this information will be displayed whenever you click on that location on your soon to be created map. When you’ve finished organizing all your information-all you have to do is copy and paste your spreadsheet into the box at the top of BatchGeo’s webpage.  Then hit the “Validate & Set Options” button.    BatchGeo typically is able to automatically detect which column is which, but to make sure it didn’t make any mistakes go through and see that, for example, the header you put on your address column shows next to “Location/Address”

Once everything is set-hit the “Make Map” button and a typical Google map will be populated with markers that represent the addresses from your spreadsheet. From there you can “save and continue”-then enter an email address to which you will be sent a link that allows you to return to this map.

The reason that I am partial to this tool is that, if you scroll to the bottom of page your map is on, you have the option of exporting the map as a KML file-which is the file type used in Google Earth. Within Google Earth you have the ability to create tours that fly from location to location for an engaging viewing experience. This could provide a unique addition to a lecture.

Even more than that-there is a tool in Esri’s ArcMap that allows you to convert KML to a layer. These layers can then be use for more advanced analysis.

BatchGeo offers a simple way, not only to visualize points, but to use these points in additional platforms. This flexibility, as it proved for one visitor to CURVE this week, provides the GSU community a gateway to interdisciplinary spatial research.

This week I wanted to discuss maps and the internet; a very broad topic, but I wanted to see what would grab my attention with this general topic after a quick internet search.  The very first search, “maps” in google, brought an article from the Washington Post with 40 maps that explain the world from a range of time periods across the last millennia.  This struck me as the epitome of what it means to have maps on the internet.  One link got me to 40 maps about the world, many of which I had not seen before.  Each map a high density information delivery system on its own, but with 40 of them I can learn an immense amount of information about the global economy, cultures, social issues, and history.  I imagine it would take me most of my day to learn the same amount of information if I were to read articles describing these maps in detail. However, maps offer visual and spatial relationships that allow absorbing new information to be efficient and timely.

A few examples of the maps within this article include: how humans spread across the world, major shipping routes in the colonial era, north american languages before colonialism, and Europe as mapped by tweets.  One that stood out to me was a map of the Happiest and Least Happy Countries.  The link to the original article was provided and I was able to quickly get into the details of how happiness was assess including the individual parameters that make up happiness, according to this study, and the data collection methods.  The original article even showed a table of happiness per country comparing surveys conducted in  2005-2007 vs. 2010-2012.  This on top of the original map provides the extra dimension of time to an already impressive data set.  Adding the extra data dimension of time is when maps and data sets can become truly powerful, hopefully fostering learning and inspiring change.

This spoke to me of why I love mapping and, even more  specifically, the power of maps.  In today’s internet, social media connected age, quality is becoming ever more important than quantity.  The maps presented in this article had links leading to other articles and videos, providing more information, links, and hopefully source information.  For me quality, source information, and details about data collection are just as important as the final map.  Attention to detail and quality data collection can make or break a map.  Presumably the maps of today will live on indefinitely. Therefore, the difference between a good map and a great map could make all the difference for communicating information and influence change.

This week, the ArcGIS Online Outreach team started discussing its newest project -“Atlanta Mass Transit: Past, Present, Future.” This project is going to be using the Planning Atlanta collection to access past planning documents for Atlanta’s conversations surrounding transportation. With these documents we plan to make an ESRI Story Map that shows the plans through the decades. Given that the streetcar has raised the level of dialogue around transportation, we hope to contribute to the discussion through this publicly available, online map.

While not all mapping is done on web based platforms, almost all map creation has been digital since the 1990’s. Not only has the way cartographers make maps changed, but technology has changed the way we view maps. What was previously printed off, hung on walls, and folded up to put in glove boxes is now contained on screens of varying sizes. Some digital maps are static, but they are becoming increasingly animated, interactive, and even 3D.

So is the paper map becoming obsolete?

According to Paul Hurst and Paul Clough from the the Royal School of Military Survey, argue that paper maps are still holding strong in the 21st century. In their article Will we be lost without paper maps in the digital age?  in the Journal of Information Science, they discuss their study which examines the the preferred mode of map consumption of experts and non-experts. An expert is someone who is a professional who has expansive experience in paper and digital map creation while a non-expert represents the general public, coming from a wide variety of backgrounds and training. The methodology consisted of a web-based questionnaire, which they used to select people to participate in a task-based user study. This user study tested the ability of the participants to use different forms of maps to way find, investigate, plan, and identify a serious of routes. What they discovered was that maps still fulfill an important niche in both professional and public sector. Professionals prefer to use paper maps while non-experts prefer online/digital maps. Both groups agree, however, that online maps are best for finding information about location and for short/long distance route planning. They also agree that paper maps are preferred for navigation on foot.

The question that comes to my mind when reading about this project is what type of differences would emerge from a closer examination of the non-experts: isn’t that who is typically using our maps anyways? Presently, I would likely identify with the non-expert group that online/digital maps was what I most commonly interested with in my daily life. However, I feel like this is strongly related to the fact that I now have a smart phone.

A year ago, I was that 23 year old, behind the times-owning a flip phone.  Back then I relied on the atlas in the back seat of my car way more than I do now. This experience prompts me to seek a more detailed examination of the variables that are present for members of the public as they make choices on how how and when to use  maps.