Progress
What have you done so far, who have you talked to, what have you gathered, and what have you built?
We mostly talked to people and researched the tools we are going to use. We’ve talked to the OCS Office Director and Data Manager, who will be our primary source, and they have most of the information we asked for about program locations, faculty directors, and program names. They should be sending our dataset over very soon.
For some OCS programs, especially the most recent ones, they also have photos/student testimonies. Unfortunately, the amount of information across the decades is not consistent, so there will not be as much information, besides logistics, for the early OCS programs.
We have also researched tools such as story maps and ArcGIS online, and are trying to decide which kind of platform our project is best suited for. For story maps, it is not easy to implement the scroller and for ArcGIS it is not easy to add extra information like photos, quotes, and testimonies when someone clicks on one dot. We are planning to use a combination of the two, starting in ArcGIS to create layers for each decade, and then move over to Story Maps to give it a more comprehensive feel.
Problems
With data, the OCS office has more information about recent OCS programs and not so much information about the old ones. The information is also a bit inconsistent. To help remedy this, we plan to focus on the information we do have, emphasizing the more recent programs in the project. It is also hard to find the number of students for each program and the OCS Office does not have that information, so all spots might have the same size. We have basic information for all OCS, so they still can be on the map. In other words, our basis for the project is remaining the same: mapping all OCS programs and adding additional information to personalize the map.
What issues have you run into? It is going to be hard making a map with both a scroller for users to choose the years and which tells stories and has photos. We will not be able to implement both. So we should choose one of those, most likely the stories, photos and quotes. Most likely we will color code the dots on the map based on decade (70s orange, 80s red, …). We will add all information we have for the map, even though some OCS Programs have little information, so there may be inconsistencies.
Have they forced you to change your initial plan? Yes, the OCS Office does not have some information we have asked for. They do not have the number of students who went to each OCS program, so we can’t make a map with dots varying in size depending on the number of people who took each OCS. We are unlikely to implement all the functionalities for the map. Because of this, we are changing the way it works; we will color code the dots based on decades, and the user will be able to click every dot (as initially planned), but only a few of them will have more detailed information
Do you have a proposed solution or do you need help formulating one?
We have a solution to most of our issues, as we were expecting that the OCS Office wouldn’t have all our information, and Austin warned us in class that we wouldn’t be able to implement all the functionalities of the map, so we started thinking about tradeoffs on our first group meeting.
Tools and Techniques
We are going to use ArcGis story maps for this project. This software makes it very easy to add points to a map with pictures and a paragraph explaining the trip linked to that point. This is exactly what our group was looking for. Story Maps also offers two different types of maps: 3d and 2d! We also used OpenRefine to clean the data.
Updated Timeline
- 11/6: Get Data, clean & format data set
- 11/7: Start making map/s
- 11/7 – 11/13: Plot each trip on our map
- 11/7 – 11/13: Add Photos to points
- 11/7 – 11/13: Add descriptions to points
- 11/7 – 11/13: Add linking to official trip websites
- 11/13: Finish map and test!
- 11/15: Submit final draft
For the most part our project is still on track. Other than the problems mentioned above about the timeline and not having the same amount of information for every trip we are running smoothly! We updated the timeline of deliverables to reflect how long it might take to manually input all the data onto our map.
Personal Contributions
Ben Turner – I met with Sonya, Madeleine, and the OCS office to talk about our project. We discussed what we are trying to accomplish and what we need to achieve that. The OCS office then agreed to send us their master spreadsheet of data and any other information they can find. I have also been involved with coordinating team meetings, writing blog posts, and organizing our group documents. I am also acting as a support for data cleaning and the arcGIS components.
Elaina Boyle – I worked on helping to figure out who in our team has which skills, in order to better create the schedule and delegate tasks more effectively.
Sonya Davidson – I attended a meeting with Ben and Madeleine to talk to the OCS director and data manager. This was helpful for getting the ball rolling with research and data access. For my role in doing research, I have been looking through photo contest photos and the 50th anniversary memories. Overall, I have just been trying to find things to make the project feel more personal. I also worked a lot on openrefine to clean up the dataset and separate it by year.
Zack Shawn – I’ve mostly been involved with supporting the group through enhancing our ideas, but I’ve also been helping with thinking through data cleaning and will help with ArcGIS soon.
Madeleine Parr – I reached out to the OCS office last week to see about collecting data and making sure they were willing for us to work on this project. After they got back to us, along with Ben and Sonya I met with Leslie Will (OCS data manager) and Helena Kaufman (OCS Director) to talk about our project plan and what types of information we needed to make it happen. Our meeting was super positive and they seemed very excited about the prospect of having a visual representation of their work over the years. The outcome of the meeting was planning for a compiled csv file with their program data to be sent our way. This file was sent to us on Friday (11/4). Beyond this I have also been helping with sourcing additional photos from the archives and contributing to the group blog posts.
Arthur Viegas Eguia – I have helped clean the dataset, removing all the canceled OCSs, I also helped the group determine some irrelevant columns of the dataset to remove (such as faculty last name), and helped fix some locations which did not appear on the map, figuring out which were the ones which were not appearing.
Cullen Baker – I have been converting our data into an arcGis online map. Once I figured out how to get the data into a map, I played around with making modifications to each datapoint. I have also tested different arcgis web apps to try and see which would fit our project best once we are done with the base online map.
