The data was provided by the OCS office, and after being cleaned, contains the name of each OCS program that Carleton has ever run, the name of the faculty in charge of it, the year (and term) each program happened, and the number of students who attended each program, and the countries each program visited.
We cleaned the data using OpenRefine and Python. We started out by deleting programs that were canceled and updating the rows of programs that were relocated. Not all data was in an ArcGIS format. Some countries were not recognized by the tool and the way the list of countries was written was also not in an ArcGIS friendly way. We fixed that using OpenRefine. The original dataset had the year and the term when each program happened, but not the specific dates, so we wrote a python program to fix that and add start date, and end date to the CSV.
After that, we used the CSV as our dataset to our ArcGIS map. We simply uploaded it to the tool with each year being its own CSV file.
After we were done with the map, we used instant apps to turn it into a time scroller.
Inserting the data into arcGIS was easy once we figured out how to do it. The combo of inefficient documentation and seemingly endless data viz options on arcGIS made figuring out how to make our maps difficult. Without Austin by our side it would’ve taken a long time to make our maps.
In order to make our maps, the cleaned and formatted CSV’s need to be added to arcgis as a feature layer. The feature layer allows us to use the same data for different types of maps! The first map we made is based off of a normal arcGIS web map. This map displays every OCS trip in Carleton’s history with a timeline to view how the trips changed over time. To make this we uploaded our data and created a new web-map. After creating the base map, we had to turn on the “time” function in our feature layer. This turns on arcGIS’s timeline function in our map. To make this map prettier we made an arcGIS instant app called “timeline.” This app allowed us to change the color, time interval, etc. of our timeline.
Our second map, which has every OCS program Carleton has run, was made on arcGIS storymaps. The best way to describe storymaps is powerpoint and arcGIS web map combined. Storymaps makes presenting map data easy and beautiful! In storymaps there is a way to create a map from a feature layer. The feature layer includes all the data that goes into the map like links to photos and descriptions! Once the data finished uploading to storymaps all we needed to do was format our descriptions and color code our points.
Overall, arcGIS made it very easy to create the map, it just took some time to figure out the exact steps arcgis needed for everything to work correctly.
