Author: alc014 (Page 1 of 2)

Final Thoughts

Summer is over! It is time to move on to the fall semester!

Overall, this research program was an entirely new experience to me. I enjoyed having control of my method and my work schedule, but too much freedom might’ve been a curse for me. I feel like I could have done more if I had started working with the same vigor that I had these past 3 weeks from the beginning. Alas, even Leonardo Di Vinci admitted to being a procrastinator.

Now that I know what I’m doing, I definitely plan to continue working on this project. I really learned to admire Janine’s skills with ArcGIS, and I would like to get better using the program. I might do a few tutorials on it and try to really get the hang of it. I want to add more states to my analyses and I would like to look at other characteristics. This is an interesting question, and I hope to further explore it.

I learned some new and valuable skills this summer. All of the technology will improve my research/class work (especially the text analyses!). I think this summer has worked to improve my overall workflow as well.

There’s really not too much to say other than I had a good summer filled with long nights and a lot of maps! I would recommend this program to other students!

Signing off–

A time for feedback

This week was feedback week, and after the discouraging news that none of our projects were ready for feedback on Tuesday, I spent this week editing my project and really thinking about it.

To be honest, I didn’t get that much feedback from the Bryn Mawr symposium. A lot of people said my project was cool, but they didn’t give me too much feedback that I can apply to my project. The most feedback I got was when I was working with ArcGIS with Janine and Carrie and they gave me tons of ideas of different ways to take my project. All of their suggestions were really great, and I think I will definitely use them.

I like the idea of doing case studies of different protests. I think that this new direction is something I can make a presentation on. I will have to work overtime to really get some work done. It’s unfortunate but I have been slacking off this summer. So to make up for lost time, its time for overdrive!!

I am going to really work on these case studies, but unfortunately, I’m not too sure how to do a case study. I will be asking a lot of questions this week on how much I’ll need to have a good case study.

This week is a big week! The final week! Hopefully everything will turn out great!!!

Another week, Another task

The fourth of July was lovely, I went home but unfortunately the internet was out! So, I didn’t end up doing nearly as much work as I would’ve liked to. But onwards and upwards! It’s time to start cracking down and finishing this project in (omg) two weeks…

So far, I’ve got a lot of details mapped out. I haven’t even started trying to compare them, and I hope tomorrow at our review I can get some input on how to best look at the data I’ve collected. I am adding transit routes to my map as I type. Arc GIS is a very sensitive program, and even when the files are correctly formatted they are often still difficult to use in the program. I wish someone would improve ArcGIS, for example: they should make organizing layers easier, they should accept excel files, and they should make other changes that improve user experience.

I hope to get as much feedback this week as possible so I can pull all nighters and work really hard on having a final product. I think I might be losing direction, but I’m working on getting that back. These next two weeks will be busy! But I am excited to get my hustle going!

This summer is going far too fast.

 

Troubleshooting

So far, as I work on ArcGIS, I have stumbled many times. Luckily, many of my mistakes are remedied by a simple adjustment.

One issue I came across was that in ArcGIS, I could not get certain areas to load information when I was enriching data. The issue was that a button is automatically clicked that made only the areas that within my screen were enriched. So one problem was solved by simply unclicking a button.

Another issue I came across was a “duplicate field name” issue that did not let me upload data. At first, I just changed field names, but now it is appearing for me again no matter how many times I change the names. I don’t know what is wrong, but I will meet with Janine again over this next week to sort it out. I feel like it will be another easy fix, but I don’t know.

Also, I am not sure how I want to design my web page. I am not a big fan of the storymaps interface, but I am not a website designer either. I would prefer something that allows me to provide more information. I am afraid that if I embed the map into a different hosting site, however, the map will lag. I will figure out my plans to make a web page shortly–I will most likely use storymaps but I just don’t like it at the moment.

Other than these few issues, I think my biggest issue is motivation! Summer beckons and I have found myself spending too much time tanning. I am working on changing my ways–and it is somewhat working? It’s Sunday night and I’m working on my project..so that’s progress! Once I get a good amount of work done, I think that the motivation will come back!

 

This week is the 4th! Happy Birthday America!

Tool Time!

Over the past few weeks, I learned a lot about data visualization tools. These tools will be important for my project because it is mostly going to be compromised of visualizing data. As I look over the many data sets that I plan to visualize, I think I can assert that I plan to use these tools:

Tableau-I think that I can clean up some data and make visualizations from the immigrant data sets. There is a lot of data about political party affiliation, whether or not people have participated in a protest, and other variables that are informative to my research that cannot be mapped. I think it will be important to include this data on my web page because it can add toward my research question. At the moment, the scope of my project is rather large, but over the next week I hope my reading will aid with my goals for these next few weeks. I know that I want to create an interactive map, but I also know that some of the data I will be looking at will not be capable of mapping.

ArcGIS-We did not formally go over this tool as a group, but I had meetings with Janine Glathar about using this and I am pretty confident that I will be using this to create my map. I have been using the past week to look over the data sets that are already in the ArcGIS system. The data sets are extremely varied, but I think I may be able to find some data that applies nationally. Overall, I think the main tool I will use is ArcGIS, as soon as I figure out how 😀

I may be using more tools along the way, but I know that I need to be more focused on the bulk of my project. As I continue organizing my project, I may decide to make a timeline or organize my uploads and create the metadata for it.

Regardless of whether or not I use the new applications that I learned for this specific project, I think all of this information I am learning is valuable. I am glad that I learned how to write metadata, TEI, and all of the other programs we learned how to use. So I will continue to learn and work hard until my project is complete!

 

« Older posts