For this week’s lab assignment we had to make a custom map on ArcGIS Online. We uploaded a spreedsheet containing our favorite locations in the Northfield area and uploaded them to ArcGIS. I first chose to add a “City of Northfield” template to my map, in which someone at Carleton had already added a detailed map of the Northfield area and Carleton’s campus. This can be seen below, as the detailed illustrative effect was a layer that I added from Carleton’s library on ArcGIS.
I then selected my six locations, six of my favorite places at Carleton. These included, my dorm this and last year, James and Evans halls, my favorite places on campus to do homework, Sayles Campus Centre and Laird Hall and lastly my two favorite places in town, the Northfield Public Library and Little Joy cafe. I added the locations, photos of said locations and their latitude and longitudes to an excel sheet and then uploaded them to the document. They were meant to appear as specific locations on the map. Below, I added screenshots of what my map looked like.
However, working with ArcGIS was not intuitive or comprehensive. I genuinely spent several hours trying my absolute best to make my map as good as it could be, and the software was just not respecting my wishes or working with me. When I inserted my custom Excel sheet of the locations I selected, ArcGIS only took 3 of them and ignored the others. Even above, the HTML file was not willing to be properly shared. The locations I upload just did not work, so I instead mapped the outlines of each of my favorite buildings. I really tried to add more details but the website was not responding to me whatsoever.
ArcGIS is incredibly powerful and can be used for to create intuitive maps of a detailed area. However, I just could not get the platform to work how I wanted it to work. I spent so much time trying to work it and unfortunately today was a losing battle. I hope that whoever is reading this can access the ArcGIS map that I did make, but given that my HTML is loading weirdly on my end, that may not be the case.
