Month: November 2023

https://grinnell.maps.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html (I’m using the training data since I did not use it on my first pass of the program).

ArcGIS is still not a program I’m very comfortable with using, but that is more because of my own inexperience with data mapping than the ArcGIS itself. Although a lot of my previous criticisms still apply: I don’t think it’s very intuitive at times and actually manipulating the data once it’s set is very difficult or even impossible. This time I did get to explore more of how the data is visualized depending on the parameters set, something I couldn’t do with my five object set, so I’m glad I could see a little more of what the program has to offer. Still,  I wouldn’t feel comfortable helping students out with ArcGIS mapping just yet. Not until I understand more about this form of visualization, at least.

I focused the training on the Exhibits. I apparently already had one that I tested out so I tried to add more to it. Using the exhibits to display the pages is pretty straightforward, but I did struggle with some of the settings. Beyond that, Omeka is still pretty easy for me to use, and I found the experience of revisiting it pretty helpful. I am unsure if it will be an option for my current project in the future, but I will still keep my eye on that in case we decide a new webpage is  the best course of action.

After working with Voyant for a little bit, I found that I prefer it over the Gale Scholar lab. I think the main reason is the interface is a lot more organized. Rather than putting the tools into multiple different pages, Voyant organizes as much as it can into one screen. While that doesn’t seem very intuitive, I feel Voyant can get away with this because it highlights the more important tools to the workflow such as the word visualizers and the summaries, while leaving less used tools or settings in tabs that the user would only access if they needed to. I also think the visualizations themselves are easier to understand since they default to formats that allow a user to process the information quickly. It’s like the difference between looking at a bar graph and looking at a table of data. In general, Voyant seems a lot more compact than Gale, which also means it doesn’t have as many tools as Gale and doesn’t processes as many file formats (I could be wrong, but I’m sure that Gale could process text from images. Maybe they were just pdfs). But I feel Voyant is also a little more accurate with the text it’s detecting.

Learning StoryMaps was actually pretty fun. I noticed the general layout is very similar to a blog, but there are so many more embeds you can add that really increase how much interactivity there is. It’s been very simple to use, so I think I could teach others how to use it. Honestly the amount I could do with it is so cool that I would consider using it on my own outside of Vivero. However, I wish the level of data displays carried over into the design aspect. There aren’t a lot of options for the overall theme of the story map, at least not at a first glance.
Update: I actually went back and found the theme creator, and it’s just as easy to use as the story maps. So yeah, I really like this program.