Beyond Geographic Locations
We aim to uncover Carleton’s hidden history and make it engaging through digital tools. By visualizing historical changes, we hope to strengthen the connection between students and campus, turning it into a place of belonging, not just a school.
Instructions For Using
- By simply scrolling down, our storytelling map will orient you to different locations on campus.
- The floating window includes the introduction of building’s history, and the fictional narrative of a student’s daily routine on campus during different time period.
How did we approach?
First, we select the featured layer we need. A featured layer includes building outlines and various attributes, such as building height, building function, and more. In many cases, the attribute information is incomplete, so we need to manually fill in the missing data.
Next, we use these attributes along with ArcGIS’s 3D extrusion function. By applying 3D extrusion based on the building height attribute, the final model’s height will match the input data.
After completing the 3D extrusion, we need to create different slides. Slides work like screenshots, capturing the system’s display at a specific angle. We adjust the viewing angle according to the images we want to present and complete the slide creation process.
Finally, we use these slides to create a Story Map. ArcGIS provides a StoryMap feature, allowing us to easily insert these slides, enabling a smooth and interactive presentation of different building models.
Resources Selection
Our project employs an interactive story map to present the difference in Carleton campus’s building between past and present. We decided to embed our story map to a WordPress website, which makes things easier for both creators and readers to process. Our target audience is current Carleton students and any prospective students being curious about Carleton’s life, so we made up two characters, Nancy from 1916 and Jason from 2016, to show the difference over centuries by comparing their normal Carleton’s daily lives, specifically, where they go and for what activities.
In our plan, we decided to have a panel on the left of the interface, just like what you see now, with three main components: Narrative, the image of the building, and the corresponding description of that building. As users scroll down the panel, the story map will move to the next location accordingly.
This planning gives us four major tasks to do:
- Looking for the correct layer and adjusting the story map
- Narrating the stories
- Picking images
- Writing the building description
- Story map
- Narrating the stories
- Picking images
- Writing the building description
Story Narrative
To narrate the stories, we need to first choose which buildings the two different protagonists will go to. To highlight the difference, we intentionally selected the buildings that differ by functionality or whether they are present or not between 1916 and 2016. In order to do that, we did a lot of research on which building was used for what purpose online. After the buildings were selected, we then came up with a reasonable narrative for each protagonist in our project.
To come up with the narratives for Nancy from 1916, two of the previous Carleton student’s project Life at Carleton from 1880 – 1930 and Imagined Futures, Forgotten Pasts did a lot of help.
We designed Jason’s daily routines purely based on our own Carleton’s lives, because there has not been a significant change since 2016 (except the construction of Anderson hall), we believe our daily routines can resemble Jason’s to a great extent.
The visual representations (timelines) of the narratives we designed are shown below:
Picking Images
Luckily, we found plenty of resources of photos of Carleton buildings, covering both old images and new images. We decided to use our own photos we took for the new images until we found the quality was lower than the online images from Carleton’s official website, so we turned to using the images from the website.
Writing the building description
Since we have already done some research of each building when we are preparing for our narrative section, what we have now is a lot of information about the history of each building. We then did the summarizing work and re-wrote the description by ourselves, focusing on its functionality, and significant changes it underwent between 1916 and 2016.