First off here’s the link. The buildings I chose were Weitz, LDC, the CMC, Sayles and Benton House in no particular order. Each building has a different color and the size of the colored circle is based on how often I visit said location. There’s definitely more I could do but there’s a skill limitation.
At one point, the color of the circle was defined by how often I visit it on a scale from yellow to blue. I don’t know how it happened or how I got rid of it and worst of all I couldn’t figure out how to get it back, thus I resorted to the much more boring size-changing circles. I don’t know if there’s a tutorial for that I should’ve followed but I feel like I missed something. The app is fairly unintuitive (as someone who’s only used it today).
ArcGIS overall seems like it would be incredibly helpful in any DH project where location is important. I think the biggest limitation of it at this point is my lack of knowledge. Like many tools before, I feel like if I used it more I’d become more comfortable using it. However, I can see this application being misused in the context of data where the location is irrelevant. Since location’s such a foundational component to ArcGIS, I think if it’s not your focal point it should be avoided entirely. However, that sounds a bit too obvious.
2 thoughts on “Lloyd Stohler Week 6 Lab Post”
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This is a really cool map! I like how you made the size of the circle correspond to how often you go to that place, as I never thought of that. I agree that the software is pretty unintuitive, as I was only able to really understand the basic functions by the time I finished making my map. I like your point about how someone should shy away from using ArcGIS if location is not one of the main aspects of their project, as it will only make it more confusing. Sometimes keeping it simple is better than being fancy.
Your map is very visually concise, so it can very quickly communicate the point you’re trying to make. Because of that, my instinct is that colors are supposed to communicate some further piece of information, but since you switched to size, they don’t really mean anything. Then again, maybe it’d be too boring to look at if they were all the same color…