Tag Archives: History and GIS
East Dakota, West Dakota
East Dakota and West Dakota
GIS is often used to help us understand the world as it is, or was in the past, or model what it could be like in the future. But it can also be used to explore what could have been. Take the case of North Dakota and South Dakota. These two states were carved out of the Dakota Territory in 1889. President Harrison did not want to show favoritism when he signed the documents in terms of which state was admitted first, so they are listed alphabetically, with North Dakota listed as the 39th state and South Dakota listed as the 40th state. In many ways, the manner in which the two states were divided, by an east-west line near the 46th Parallel, made sense. Yet what if the territory had not been divided into North Dakota and South Dakota yet as East Dakota and West Dakota?
Several geographers over the years have speculated about the physical and cultural ‘divide’ that persists to this day. Many residents of the two states use the term “East River” to refer to lands east of the Missouri River, and “West River” to refer to lands west of the Missouri River. To me, this is the perfect lesson whose value is enhanced with the use of GIS, and specifically, the creation of data within ArcGIS desktop and the serving and sharing of that data on ArcGIS Online.
Using ArcGIS desktop, I created my two states using county lines that followed the Missouri River. What to do about the Bismarck? I left Mandan, on the west bank of the Missouri, in WD, in part because when one departs Bismarck on I-94, it really does feel like one is entering the “west”. Northwest of Bismarck, where the river turns west, I included the counties in northwestern North Dakota as part of West Dakota. The reason is that I considered that they have more physical and cultural characteristics in common with the west than the east. I highly enjoyed my next task: Selecting my two capital cities: Rapid City, “WD” and Sioux Falls, “ED”. I considered Fargo for the ED capital but settled on Sioux Falls for several reasons. Thus, Sioux Falls, ED is like Cheyenne, WY: Tucked into the corner of a vast territory. After my work in ArcGIS desktop, I shared my states on ArcGIS Online so others can use it as part of an educational lesson.
East Dakota has 79 counties. Its population rose from 637,720 in 1900 to 979,147 in 1950 to 1,119,642 by 2010. West Dakota has 40 counties. Only 65,604 lived there in 1900, in large part the miners who were still combing the Black Hills) but by 1950 it still only contained 289,571, and in 2010, 367,229 lived there. Thus, my East and West states are more lopsided in population than are the north and south states. Interestingly, over the past few years, my West Dakota is growing more rapidly than East Dakota with the expansion of the energy sector near Williston.
This activity, anchored squarely in the “what if”, helps students think spatially about physical geography, cultural geography, and history.
What sorts of “what if” scenarios can you create with a GIS?
Learning, Unlearning, and Relearning
“The illiterate of the 21st century,” wrote Alvin Toffler, “will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
Toffler’s words seem particularly appropriate to the GIS profession. In 1983, I was among the last of students who for over 10 years were using the SYMAP program to create 3D mesh terrain surfaces. My colleagues and I at the US Census Bureau used GIS to develop the TIGER system during the late 1980s. I started using ArcInfo in 1989 at version 4 at the USGS. Despite the huge changes that occurred in GIS at that time, I firmly believe that I have seen more change in the past 3 years than I did for the previous 30 years. The open data movement, crowdsourcing, cloud computing, attention to spatial thinking, mobile apps, and SDKs are among the forces that are modifying huge portions of our profession, from the technology to the number and variety of people in it.
Changes in GIS and society are having an enormous impact on GIS education: What must we teach to help learners update their current skills and prepare them for the future? How must we as GIS educators most effectively educate ourselves? To think about it as Toeffler might, think about all that you have learned, unlearned, and relearned in GIS over the years. (I confess that I am still wondering about Toeffler’s “unlearning” process. Do we really “unlearn” or do we just forget some of the details of what we no longer need to know?) I remember the time I invested in learning how to download, format, and use SDTS-formatted spatial data, and then creating a 25 page document to help others do the same. Is that document still needed? Do most GIS folks today even know what SDTS is? I had to learn how to use that type of data, and then relearn how to use spatial data when the formats and the software changed. Today, with the coupling of desktop and web-based GIS, software updates no longer occur annually, but at least quarterly if not more often. You cannot effectively use all of the ArcGIS Online resources if your version of ArcGIS for Desktop is a few versions behind. New data, apps, and other resources appear daily. GIS seems to me to be the perfect example of why lifelong learning is essential.
Furthermore, something common to every GIS professional is the experience of having difficulty with getting a task in GIS to work, modifying it, trying it again, and assessing the results. I recently had difficulty matching an ArcGIS Online basemap with a set of data, because I had guessed incorrectly at the projection that the vector data was in. While these experiences can be frustrating, we tend to more clearly remember their details than when our problem solving workflow is smooth and easy. In short, the difficulties we experience in learning and relearning actually help us in the learning process.
I see Toffler’s point but I also think that reading and writing are important 21st Century skills, and are more critical now than ever before. In my role on the Esri education team, I spend more time reading, writing, and communicating than I do on other tasks. Yet even the bulk of time I spend reading, writing, and communicating is with the objective of learning and relearning, and teaching others.
How does GIS require and foster lifelong learning? How can you model lifelong learning with GIS with your students?
Election, ArcGIS Online, History and GIS, webmapping, curriculum, ArcLessons
I have created a data set containing electoral history for the past 56 years in ArcGIS Online, so you and your students can interact with it, teach with it, and explore patterns. To accompany the data set, I wrote a lesson entitled, “Which states went for which candidate? Elections” is in the ArcLessons library.
What is the difference between the popular vote and the electoral vote? What influences voting patterns at present and what influenced the patterns in the past? Why do electoral votes sometimes exhibit a regional or national pattern and sometimes exhibit no pattern? After examining the maps dating back to 1956, which election years would you say were the closest in terms of the electoral vote, and which were the most one-sided? Which states voted consistently Republican, or Democratic, in the past? When have third-party candidates been a factor? When did the candidate lose his “home state?” Which states change back and forth in terms of political party over time, and do these correspond to what are referred to as “swing states”? How does population distribution influence the electoral vote and where candidates spend their time and money?
These questions and many more can be effectively analyzed by using the above maps and lesson. ArcGIS Online provides an excellent platform for learning about issues, patterns, and phenomena. Because elections data in the USA are tied to administrative boundaries, elections maps can be easily created. Examining election data in ArcGIS Online allows the data to be effectively and easily used by educators, students, and others, anywhere around the world.
Another map and data set containing electoral votes by state for the upcoming election, along with demographic information and much more, was compiled by my colleague Charlie Fitzpatrick, and makes an excellent accompanying data set. These data sets can be used with an accompanying blog post describing what is there and how to use it.
It is my hope that these data sets and lessons will be helpful in teaching and learning in these next few weeks, and beyond.
- Joseph Kerski, Esri Education Manager
Reflections on Terraserver and the Evolution of Data for GIS
Back in 1998, I and my colleagues were thrilled with the arrival of Terraserver. While maps and images for use in GIS on the web today are commonplace, back then it was revolutionary. Suddenly, thanks to an agreement between the USGS and Microsoft, the GIS community had access to USGS topographic maps and aerial photographs down to 1 meter spatial resolution for the entire USA. Two additional features made this service extra special. First, these images were georeferenced, meaning that they could be easily used within a GIS environment. Second, these images were online: No CD-ROMs or other physical media were required! After downloading the maps and aerials for our area of interest, we could read these maps and images into our ArcInfo or ArcView GIS software. True, the header files often needed to be edited first, but this resource gave us a huge leap forward because we had terabytes of data at our fingertips via http://www.terraserver-usa.com, later becoming http://msrmaps.com. Even better was when some enterprising folks at Esri wrote programs to automatically stream these images to ArcGIS.
Now, 14 years later, Terraserver was recently retired. As the National Atlas recently wrote, “We note its passing and salute all those who developed the service. Many people were involved in this groundbreaking effort. Still, there were three individuals who largely provided the vision and hard work that resulted in this remarkable service: Tom Barclay (Microsoft), Beth Duff (USGS, deceased), and Hedy Rossmeissl (USGS, retired). The National Atlas switched over to services provided by Esri so that Atlas users can continue to link from our maps to large-scale topo maps and aerial views. This takes us full circle. The National Atlas Map Maker was the first on-line, interactive mapper offered by the Federal government. It was partially developed under a joint research effort by the USGS and ESRI
in 1997.”
A plethora of base maps, topographic maps, satellite images, and aerial photographs are now available to the GIS user and the general public such as via ArcGIS Online. Times have changed but the need for good base data lives on. While I don’t long for those days of tinkering with header files, I salute the early pioneers who made it all happen, and look forward to the future. The evolution of GIS data, and discussion about data sources, quality, and related issues are detailed and blogged weekly about in the book that Jill Clark and I wrote, entitled The GIS Guide to Public Domain Data.
I and my colleagues frequently need old aerials for land use change studies, however, and therefore, I wish Terraserver had remained online. Why couldn’t it have done so? What are now the best sources for old aerial photographs?
- Joseph Kerski, Education Manager, Esri
Fun With GIS 117: The Future of the Past
As a kid, history baffled me. I floundered in the whirlpool of names, dates, and variably detailed accounts. I saw no pattern, no threads of organization. It was not until college, when I studied “regions” in geography, that the maelstrom of history began to stratify into patterns.
Today’s students have even more chance for confusion. The past grows ever more detailed, more open to cataloguing and endless shuffling. Fortunately, history lends itself to a geographic view, and ArcGIS Online makes it easy for educators and students alike to build their own view of yesteryear, demonstrating that the past can be re-organized infinitely.
Had I a time turner and the chance to re-do my history classes from grades 5, 7, and 11, I would want to bring ArcGIS Online. Not all of history has been converted into databases organized for geographic analysis, though some collections exist. Therefore, students can build their own, constructing and presenting their views, engaging deeply in the past. Even building simple catalogues of events or people tied to places, exposed over time, can help students fathom the past.
We are well into the sesquicentennial of the US Civil War, echoes of which linger even today. Students can view a small collection of data about battles, as one example of organization. An experienced user might take the liberty of revising the popup, or the classification and symbolization. What additional approaches or data might also make sense, exposing alternative views into the past?
John McHale once wrote a powerful little “poem” about time:
- The future of the past is in the future.
- The future of the present is in the past.
- The future of the future is in the present.
He meant that we constantly redefine what we think of the past, and our actions back then influenced the prospects we have today, and the outlook for tomorrow is based on what we do today.
Helping students of today become thoughtful leaders of tomorrow requires that they fathom the conditions, ideas, and decisions of the past. This takes more than memorization. It calls for exploring, grappling, analyzing, and integrating. ArcGIS Online is a powerful tool for encouraging such wrestling with time and space.
- Charlie Fitzpatrick, Esri Schools Program Manager
Titanic's Geography & Classes
We observe the centennial of the sinking of the Titanic by map-enabling its passenger list.
This latest story map from Esri adds a different dimension to the Titanic, a more personal geographic picture. Explore the levels of loss as you step from 1st class to 3rd class.
Bicentennial of the New Madrid Earthquakes: Seismic Calamity along the Mississippi
On December 16, 1811 a violent earthquake shattered a winter night along the Mississippi River Valley in an area of present-day northeast Arkansas. While the region was sparsely settled at the time, the local European and Native American inhabitants were being introduced to what would only be the beginning of a nightmarish winter framed by the mid-December occurrence, followed by another main event in late January, and an even more fierce temblor in early February centered outside the village of New Madrid in the Bootheel of present-day Missouri. The community was effectively destroyed, while in St. Louis, over 150 miles upriver, houses were severely damaged with chimneys crashing down. All of the principal shocks were felt far to the east with amazing reports coming from cities as far away as Boston and Toronto. In between and into the spring, numerous aftershocks were triggered and felt. Together, these were the largest earthquakes to have occurred since European settlement east of the Rocky Mountains in the US and Canada.
I grew up near this region and have experienced first-hand what can happen in this seismically active area. A few years ago, I created a blog series and a map project using ArcGIS Explorer Desktop to examine some aspects of the region. My work then was triggered by a sizeable event in the spring of 2008 in southern Illinois. Today’s blog post draws a bit from that series but its main purpose is to highlight a new map I’ve been building using ArcGIS Explorer Online, a growing array of map services found in ArcGIS Online, and some CSV files I crafted and added to my map. Not surprising, the map is focused on the Bicentennial of the New Madrid Earthquakes.
Rather than describe the specifics of what the map contains, I have instead added that information as “metadata” and discussion at the map’s storage location in ArcGIS Online, as well as links to some USGS resources. Here’s a mini-URL that you can share, www.esriurl.com/NewMadrid. Once you are at the site, open the map in either the default option, Explorer Online, or the ArcGIS.com mapviewer. Also, rather than take you on a guided tour, here instead are a couple of screenshots of what you’ll discover.
Historical earthquakes and recent events
Historical earthquakes and nearby populated places
Please feel free to augment what I have done and save your own version of the map by logging in with your Esri Global Account, doing a “save as,” and share the new map. If you do craft your version, be sure to add your own description and other information for other users.
Also, remember the New Madrid Seismic Zone and similar zones in the Central US are active. Be sure to examine current population densities in these areas to begin to understand the human risk in a region not immediately recognized as a hazardous area.
Lastly, stay tuned for an Esri Map Story on this topic later this week.
- George Dailey, Co-Manager, Esri Education Program Manager
Civil War Sesquicentennial: Fort Sumter
On April 12, 1861 the range of issues that the country had been contending with for decades erupted into armed conflict between the North and the South. It began at Fort Sumter, an island Federal fortification in Charleston Harbor (South Carolina), as Confederate artillery opened fire. Literally, surrounded by Confederate installations, in little over a day, the Union garrison there surrendered. The Civil War had begun.
There is much historical narrative content available to help you and your students better understand this event and the future ones that unfold across the ensuing years of the war. Here are some geographically-focused resources that may provide you a different/broader perspective.
Esri colleague, Allen Carroll (former chief cartographer at National Geographic) has brought 1861 and 2011 together in an online map story, http://mapstories.esri.com/sumter/. In addition to leveraging ArcGIS Online and creating a custom app, the past comes alive through the assistance of David Rumsey and primary documents from his historical map collection. These resources provide clear context to what, from a geographical standpoint, had to seem like a inevitable outcome to both sides in the fight.
The combination of the historical map content and present-day imagery also provides a 150-year look at persistence and change in the landscape. For instance, note the battery placements to the southwest of Fort Sumter and the current shoreline.
Other commanding geographic resources to explore include maps and an animation from the Civil War Trust. They provide a look at the fall/capture of the fort in April 1861 and offer maps depicting defenses in the successive years. Likewise, the National Park Service has a range of resources about Fort Sumter and associated areas.
Peer into the Civil War in greater depth (geographically and temporally) by making the most of materials in the Civil War map collection at the Library of Congress. Also ready for use is the rich array of geographic resources in the David Rumsey Map Collection, in particular nearly 300 Civil War maps and documents he has organized by publication date for easy viewing and use, such as this panoramic map of the seat of war in the Delmarva region
Stay tuned: In the coming months, we will post other resources and ideas for exploring this pivotal period in American history.
- George Dailey, ESRI Education Program Manager
Population Drift: Analyzing the Drift of Mean Population Centers Over Time With GIS
The examination of mean centers of geographic phenomena is a powerful spatial analytical tool. The mean center is the point at which a given set of features can “balance” as on the point of a pencil. The mean center is constructed from average x and y values stored in feature centroids. The ability to apply weights makes the incorporation of mean centers even more useful in instruction and research.
The ability to study how the mean center of a certain phenomena changes over time adds value to mean center analysis. Perhaps the most common example of this is the movement of the population center of the United States from 1790 to the present, a map that appears in many geography textbooks. Computing mean center is easy to do in ArcGIS desktop’s Spatial Statistics tools.
With a lesson and a rich historical data set that I created and placed in the ArcLessons library, the movements of the US population center can be studied. The lesson can be used to analyze the causes and effects of population dynamics, including age structure, immigration, lifestyle, job growth and decline, rural to urban migration, sunbelt and retiree migration, and other factors. The lesson also considers the location of lakes, rivers, highways, and federal lands and how they may or may not influence population change.
On the map below, using a “case field,” the 1900 state centers are shown in blue, and the 2000 centers are shown in red.
What if a “median center” instead of mean center is used? Consider analyzing the mean population center for your community, at the census tract or block group level. Where would the mean center be? Mean center analysis would be useful for a wide variety of data as soil samples in a field, asthma patients in a city, or gas wells in a basin.
Through this lesson, students will understand the definition of a mean center, a weighted mean center, and a population weighted mean center, how to calculate mean population centers for the United States and for individual states using GIS, understand how and why the U.S. population center moved from 1790 to the present, and analyze how and why the population centers for individual states moved from 1900 to the present. GIS skills include the use of spatial statistics, selecting and exporting spatial and attribute data, symbolizing and labeling maps, and using GIS to make informed decisions.
My favorite part of the lesson is state-level analysis. Nevada is one fascinating example. The mean center of population’s southerly drift is due to the rise of Las Vegas as a major population nexus for the state and the country.
How might you be able to use this in your own research and teaching?
- Joseph Kerski, ESRI Education Manager
The Amazing Around the World Flight of the Pacific Clipper During World War II
The spatial perspective through GIS has been shown in research and in classroom application as enhancing student understanding of hundreds of processes, patterns, and phenomena from local to global. A new lesson in the ArcLessons library provides another means of incorporating spatial thinking and analysis in teaching and learning—in this case, applied to a historical event.
The problem that students face when opening the lesson is as follows: Getting set to land in New Zealand in December 1941, the crew of a Pan American Airways seaplane learned about the attacks at Pearl Harbor and had to make a fateful decision: Since it was now impossible to fly back across the Pacific Ocean given the unfolding war, could they return to the United States by flying west instead of east? No commercial airliner had ever flown around the world before. Could they make it? Your task is to use spatial analysis and GIS to analyze every detail of this epic event.
Skills developed include analyzing a nonfictional historical story using the spatial perspective, analyzing patterns and spatial relationships within 2-D (ArcMap) and 3-D (ArcGIS Explorer) GIS, creating an ArcGIS Explorer presentation, performing spatial and attribute queries, creating a map layout, and presenting findings to an audience.
Students investigate the story in popup boxes along the route and perform spatial and attribute queries. For a short account of the journey, read John Marshall’s story on http://www.radiocom.net/Clipper/, and for the full story, read Ed Dover’s book The Long Way Home available from: http://www.longwayhome.com/.
Lessons such as this show the value of GIS and the spatial perspective in enhancing understanding of literature and history. These lessons are well connected to educational content standards in social studies and English language arts that explain what students should know and be able to do. Using GIS in this way makes it clear that GIS is a critical thinking tool. The understanding of any story—fiction or nonfiction—can be enhanced by maps and spatial analysis. What story do you want to investigate?
-Joseph Kerski, ESRI Education Manager
