Explorer, GIS Day, and Geography Awareness Week

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 20:12:00 GMT

Yesterday was GIS Day, and we've still got a couple of days left in Geography Awareness Week. About.com informs us that:

Geography Awareness Week was established in 1987 when U.S. President Ronald Reagan signed legislation that established the third week in November as Geography Awareness Week. Geography Awareness Week is sponsored by the National Geographic Society and other geographic organizations at the national, state, and local level.

We've received some screenshots and descriptions of Explorer being used on GIS Day and throughout this week. If you have more examples that you'd like to share, let us know by sending a screenshot and description via e-mail to arcgisexplorerblog@esri.com

This first example is from Adam Pittman, who prepared a presentation for the fourth grade class at Cambridge Elementary School in San Antonio, Texas. The students are learning about explorers of North America, and ArcGIS Explorer was used to look at the explorations of Coronado, Lewis & Clark, and LaSalle.

Here's a screenshot of the Lewis & Clark exploration ending up at Fort Clatsop, Oregon, where Capt. William Clark wrote in his journal "Ocian in view! O! the joy." While they weren't quite at the ocean, they were close, having reached the Columbia River estuary. Various camps are shown along the route.

Coronado travelled up from Mexico, heading to the Grand Canyon and then heading east through Texas and up to Kansas. He stopped just outside Lindsborg, Kansas, erecting a small fort on top of a hill, shown below. The fort has been rebuilt and can be seen in Explorer's default map.

GIS tools were used to analyze terrain and view other layers of information that could have helped these early explorers, like weather, topography, vegetation, and others.

And Ray Carnes presented at the Highland (California) Library and Environmental Learning Center as part of a "See Highland Through Maps" GIS Day exhibit. Shown below is a part of the city with average household income information. Images like these helped visitors understand the characteristics of their local community.

Mapping the Lewis & Clark Expedition with Explorer

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 19:43:00 GMT

(Post submitted by: George Dailey, K-12 Education Program Manager)

The release of ArcGIS Explorer opens the door to making use of not only ready-made services like those available from ArcGIS Online but also shapefiles that a user might access from his/her personal computer. In a test of that, I wanted to see how data we have created about the Lewis & Clark Expedition appear and function inside the ArcGIS Explorer environment.

The screenshot shows draping the entire expedition route (planning, recruitment, and exploration) over the default globe. To give historical context, shapefiles displaying the boundaries of the United States (1783-1803) and the Louisiana Purchase (1803) were added. The route layer was reordered placing it on top using the “Manage Layers” function. The transparency of the polygon layers was adjusted to allow both the satellite imagery and geographic areas to be visible.

To help the viewer better understand the layers and provide more historical context, I used the Create Notes Task for the three features, adding a Note title and text. A white-outlined polygon shapefile of US state boundaries was added to provide current day geographical context. Transparency on this layer was set at 80%, offering a ghostly quality to match the notion of peering across time. (NOTE: Manipulating the transparency slider from 0-100 and vice versa while demonstrating this in Explorer cements this temporal impression quite nicely).

I saved this project as an NMF that I can return to in the future. Note that the features might not remain as shown in the screenshot when reopened, but all aspects of their content and that of the layers and globe scale and position are maintained. Anyone can build a similar or even more complex project showing other aspects of the Lewis & Clark Expedition (US cities 1803, Continental Divide, key expedition camp sites, and major rivers and lakes) by downloading the Lewis & Clark 3 lesson package from ArcLessons. The shapefiles in the lesson package are immediately useable in ArcGIS Explorer.

If I were to give you the drive and path information for the shapefiles on my computer, I could in fact share my L&C map and it would work quite well on other computers assuming a mimic of my data path information. Conversely, a user receiving my L&C map and downloading the needed shapefiles could open the NMF with a word processor, find the four feature path entries, change them to match his/her preferred path, resave the NMF, and launch the prepared project.

But I think the best way to explore what’s described above is to download the Lewis & Clark 3 lesson data and build your own project. It’s easy and fun!

ArcGIS Explorer Blog : Lewis & Clark

Explorer, GIS Day, and Geography Awareness Week

Mapping the Lewis & Clark Expedition with Explorer