Process
For this map, I chose to pick building I regularly frequent around the same amount each week. This included my one of my academic buildings, my workplace, the library, the campus center, and my home. While the process took a decent amount of time, figuring out which setting were best and exploring the capabilities of the software, I found it fairly intuitive. My biggest struggle was figuring out what color scheme to go with to make the data stand out. I ended up choosing Carleton colors as it seemed fitting and stood out well against the basemap I chose. I chose the spike option for my CSV layer as it didn’t block the polygons I created and the different frequencies were more easily distinguishable. Here is an imbeded version of my final app, as well as links to both below it:
ArcGIS’ Potential and Capabilities
As this process was fairly simple, I can imagine a lot of potential for digital humanities projects with ArcGIS and larger sets of data. While it would be more time-consuming if you wanted to implement a polygon feature layer with a larger data set, there are enough symbol types and options for layers to choose from that might better suit your data. And if a polygon feature layer is necessary for the project, it will just be a tedious process, not a very difficult one as the software makes it very easy to create typical shapes needed for maps. However, it still makes the process much easier than it would be from scratch which allows users with more humanities based experience to use this software for digital humanities projects and not necessarily need to rely on someone with technological knowledge. Overall, this was a fun exercise and good experience that showed me how easy it can be to represent spatial data with the necessary patience.
