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Mapstory
What is Mapstory?
It’s a website program that shows the transformation of a certain part of the world through time. Time frames for individual Mapstories span from the past, present, and even the future. The site’s intent is to share information about an evolution of a certain place for the world to see.
It’s a website program that shows the transformation of a certain part of the world through time. Time frames for individual Mapstories span from the past, present, and even the future. The site’s intent is to share information about an evolution of a certain place for the world to see.
The Process:
Group 1:
Mapstory was nowhere near perfect; it was as flawed as a program could be. The problems the team faced were due to the fact the idea of Mapstory was raw. It was not advanced enough for what it could produce. It had great potential, but through the glitches and lags it was a slow slog of tediousness. We weren’t able to edit layers simultaneously, which is less than ideal because we had to make each layer spotless before moving on, which didn’t happen because we always found mistakes in previous work. The layers were able to stand on their own, but when we combined layers, they wouldn’t cooperate. Some of the data points wouldn’t show up, the points would move, and sometimes they would disappear with a wrong click of the mouse.
The finished product is a result of three students, one expert, and even the Mapstory director. I can say that I’m proud of what we did, even if it fell far from perfection. We stuck with a difficult program, no matter how frustrated we got and the results are pretty good. I wish it would reflect the hard work we put into this aspect of the project, but this class was bound to experience failure somewhere along the journey
Group 1:
Mapstory was nowhere near perfect; it was as flawed as a program could be. The problems the team faced were due to the fact the idea of Mapstory was raw. It was not advanced enough for what it could produce. It had great potential, but through the glitches and lags it was a slow slog of tediousness. We weren’t able to edit layers simultaneously, which is less than ideal because we had to make each layer spotless before moving on, which didn’t happen because we always found mistakes in previous work. The layers were able to stand on their own, but when we combined layers, they wouldn’t cooperate. Some of the data points wouldn’t show up, the points would move, and sometimes they would disappear with a wrong click of the mouse.
The finished product is a result of three students, one expert, and even the Mapstory director. I can say that I’m proud of what we did, even if it fell far from perfection. We stuck with a difficult program, no matter how frustrated we got and the results are pretty good. I wish it would reflect the hard work we put into this aspect of the project, but this class was bound to experience failure somewhere along the journey
Group 2:
Starting off MapStory was frustrating and confusing. MapStory has many parts to it and it took my group a few class periods to figure out how to upload our story layers and all of our data. To find the data we went through multiple steps of either a longitude latitude map from google which we used to match up the points on our maps from the archives, and place them on the google map, or we would use Google Earth, which also gave us the latitude and longitude. To make sure we could do everything as swiftly and used our time well and not waste class periods, we made excel charts in google docs so all three members of the group could add data and all be working at the same time. When we uploaded all of our story layers and shared those with the MapStory group from the other class, we also gained a few of their layers. By splitting up the work between not only the three members in my group but also the other history class, we used our time sufficiently and got more done than expected! After now putting together final projects of all of our data, or stories, we can see the trends of alley life in DC and the growth in certain areas. It is very interesting to see a final product to this project we have worked on for a few months!
We also got to work directly with one of the founders of MapStory when we went to the National Archives. This let us explain our frustrations and helped get feedback on ways to get over our bumps. A MapStory intern also came into our class and helped show us these ways and changes for our story. This was a great source to have and use, which we did use. Emailing this intern was very helpful, and she responded very speedy which helped us get a lot done in our class periods instead of getting stuck and not being able to move on. By learning this information on our own and from documents straight from the archives, it is an experience and information I will never forget. By learning this way instead of straight from the text book we are doing so much more than just memorizing information and spitting it back out. We are LEARNING, and GROWING historians.
Starting off MapStory was frustrating and confusing. MapStory has many parts to it and it took my group a few class periods to figure out how to upload our story layers and all of our data. To find the data we went through multiple steps of either a longitude latitude map from google which we used to match up the points on our maps from the archives, and place them on the google map, or we would use Google Earth, which also gave us the latitude and longitude. To make sure we could do everything as swiftly and used our time well and not waste class periods, we made excel charts in google docs so all three members of the group could add data and all be working at the same time. When we uploaded all of our story layers and shared those with the MapStory group from the other class, we also gained a few of their layers. By splitting up the work between not only the three members in my group but also the other history class, we used our time sufficiently and got more done than expected! After now putting together final projects of all of our data, or stories, we can see the trends of alley life in DC and the growth in certain areas. It is very interesting to see a final product to this project we have worked on for a few months!
We also got to work directly with one of the founders of MapStory when we went to the National Archives. This let us explain our frustrations and helped get feedback on ways to get over our bumps. A MapStory intern also came into our class and helped show us these ways and changes for our story. This was a great source to have and use, which we did use. Emailing this intern was very helpful, and she responded very speedy which helped us get a lot done in our class periods instead of getting stuck and not being able to move on. By learning this information on our own and from documents straight from the archives, it is an experience and information I will never forget. By learning this way instead of straight from the text book we are doing so much more than just memorizing information and spitting it back out. We are LEARNING, and GROWING historians.
