Postgraduate research students and staff at the University of East Anglia were very fortunate to receive an amazing workshop on ArcGIS online and Story Maps with Dr Katy Appleton and Addy Pope (Esri UK). ArcGIS online is a lighter weight version of the popular spatial data platform, and using our institutional account, we worked through several exercises, incorporating open data ranging from school and police station locations to reported crimes.
Story Maps is an application platform for ArcGIS that allows users to create narratives and presentations around spatial data. This was very exciting as a visualisation tool. As part of the session, we were encouraged to bring with us some data that we would like to work with. I am interested in doctoral education, and there is one very useful dataset provided by the British Library: EThOS, the metadata on UK doctoral theses.
I was interested in mapping the theses by institution nationally over the last 18 months (2017-18), which was 12,374 theses in total. These data were imported into ArcGIS from a CSV (comma separated values) file, and the institutions were geolocated automatically on the basis of institution name (not the most accurate means of doing so, but mostly correct).
Using the templates in Story Maps, it was possible to create a dashboard for viewing theses geographically, and then allowing users to click through the theses at each institution, and link to the British Library’s EThOS entry, which also includes the abstract and link to the full text where available. Fortunately, the British Library also lists this thesis type, which is quite helpful in separating out the many different forms of thesis (not just the PhD).
Your can view the web application in Story Maps here.