Digital Mapping Questionaire
Written by armstroc@lawrence (Carolyn Armstrong?), Anonymous Users, and Louis K Epstein. Edited by Alan Zheng. Reviewed by Austin Mason and Aaron Young
Introduction
How to do it & How it works
The digital mapping questionnaire is a set of questions that helps you understand your project. The questionnaire is divided into 6 sections, each section containing different questions.
Review the questions below, record your answers, and keep them for future reference. If you want to, also discuss your results with a friend or colleague.
Ingredients
The Most Important Ingredient: An open mind.
Section 1: Brainstorming
What do you want to think about more?
How is a map going to further your thinking?
Analysis?
Collection?
Organization?
Publication?
Presentation?
Teaching?
What are your spatial question(s)?
Who is the audience?
What is the end goal?
What do you want to know?
How should space and place be represented?
How should you collect and organize data? Is this compatible with multiple platforms? How much data do you need?
Notes and Reflection
Section 2: A Resource Audit (AKA - What if I get stuck)
What are your resources?
Sample Resources: Software, hardware, funding, expertise, existing scholarship, cookbooks, institutional support, institutional software support, libraries, software customer service, Digital Humanities groups.
What are your software options?
Does this connect to software skills or knowledge you already have?
Has someone already tried to do this? How?
Where can you look for inspiration?
What resources exist so that you can better educate myself? Are there free classes and tutorials for the software? Is there grant support and professional development opportunities?
Who's already doing work around this injustice?
What are the gaps in the current scholarship?
Notes and Reflection
Section 3: Critical Questions
What values are driving your interests and research questions?
How can you be constructive, critical and ethical in your digital mapping project? (Identify problematic aspects and/or challenges in the project.)
What are the non-digital alternatives to these mapping strategies? (List them)
Are there alternatives to maps? Are spatial representations essential for the project?
What is not or cannot be represented on your map?
How might different representations distort or mislead? Consider sharing your map with others and asking what they see.
How can you share and acknowledge the map limitations?
Can this map be represented through an anti-racist and anti-colonial lense? What is the history of the type of map you’re using?
How are you choosing the labels, names, graphics, and languages included on the map? Are they specific to a time, culture, place, group, and perspective?
Is the map information accessible? What are the limitations of visual representations? Are there text-to-speech applications that can access the information on the map? How are you using color? Are you using red and green to distinguish important key components? What are alternative fills to color-coding?
Notes and Reflection
Section 4: Connection to Teaching and Student Involvement
Which of your current or upcoming classes could you use to incorporate new tools or the research project or both?
How can your research question be assessed as part of the course curriculum?
How could digital mapping serve your learning outcomes?
Would your research be amplified with the support a student assistant?
Are there (summer) research opportunities for students?
Notes and Reflection
Section 5: Considerations for Public Engagement and Presentation
How is the data being made available to the public at an affordable cost?
How will your data be presented to a public, non-academic audience?
What conferences or academic publications would support this scholarship?
In what ways can you advocate for your scholarship in the tenure and promotion process? (How does this work in different disciplines?)
Do journals and publication venues have guidelines and restrictions on file types and sizes for publications?
How does your map look displayed on a smartphone? Are the maps best viewed on laptops and desktops?
Notes and Reflection
Section 6: You decided to map… now what?
Once you have decided to actually design a map, it might be helpful to consider the following questions:
What is the end game of my collected data?
For publication / presentations / talks
consider presses like Lever press
Online resources - create your own webpage to display your work (wordpress?)
Also, how much of your map are you up to sacrifice to publish in “old-fashioned” venues?
For teaching purposes
Consider how collaborative is the tool that you picked.
Consider how accessible is the program:
Free?
Access through your institution?
Help from IT? Are they familiar with this program?
Does it publish to the web, or is it only accessible through a desktop version?
Pace the progress and establish your teaching goals
Design a rubric
How many locations I am going to pin?
If you have a lot of points:
Consider elaborating a dataset through google sheets / airtable. Then, export it as a .csv file. If you start manually placing markers and then you have a lot, it might be more difficult for you to reorganize that data or excerpt from it later.
You need to be consistent introducing data. See our recipe on “how to clean data.”
If you don’t have a lot of points:
Maybe My Maps is a tool that might be helpful for you.
Maybe projection of a map in a white board is an option to be considered.
What do I want to do with the points? Movement? A story? Documentation? Annotation?
If you are recreating a path in which movement is crucial, you might consider tools such as:
Carto, QGIS, ArcGIS storymaps
TRICK: If you want to collect data, you can install in your phone a gps tracker (like the ones that count steps) and allow it to register space.
If you are documenting / annotating historic places, then you might wonder…
To georectify or not to georectify… that is the question :)
Where to find historical maps - (David Rumsey Map Collection for example)
Which features would help me support my espacial point / argument in the map?
3D
Consistent legend
Colour coding
How many layers am I considering in my project?
Be aware that some programs won’t support more than 10 layers. Ex. Google Maps. Some programs only support a single layer, like StoryMapJS
Further Resources
Advice and Questions for Guiding Research:
Knowles, Anne Kelly (2008). Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data and GIS are Changing Historical Scholarship. Digital supplement edited by Ami Hellier. ESRI Press, Redlands CA.
Maps and Accessibility:
Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh http://web-accessibility.carnegiemuseums.org/content/maps/
Esri GeoDev Webinar “Web Accessibility Best Practices” (ArcGIS)
Esri Improving Accessibility of Story Map with Alt text
Making maps accessible (for navigation)
If you’re trying to use color to distinguish data, consider using colorbrewer2.org or color.adobe.com for ideas.
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