Sunday, August 18, 2013

A Walk By the Bay

Yesterday, William and Daniel and I went for a walk along Back Bay, off Lake Winnipesaukee in Wolfeboro. We've made that walk often; it's one of our favorite places to take a stroll. But this particular walk had a special purpose: data collection.

Over the past five weeks, I've been taking a fascinating online course called Maps and the Geospatial Revolution. During that time, I've listen to video lectures, read course material, and played around with some powerful online tools which are available for free (with limited functionality—limited, that is, if you're a professional geographer; it seems nearly limitless to me). The culmination of the five weeks is to use a map to tell a story, which will be reviewed and graded by my peers in the class.

That doesn't make me nervous. I'm in it for the knowledge, not the grade (it's not a credit course anyway, and I'm not headed for a degree in geography anytime soon). The process itself, though, is interesting. In order to make this story map, I had to go out into the field and collect location data, then import that data into a map that somehow tells a story.

I saw a template that showed points of interest along a particular bridge in New York, and decided to adapt that idea to our favorite walking tour. I could use the same template; I just had to add my own pictures, descriptions, and locations. I had recently read a cautionary story about using a smartphone to take online pictures; people can extract the exact location the picture was taken from the data and sometime use it to stalk people.

Now I wasn't worried about that; it only happens when the GPS is turned on, and I hardly use my GPS because it uses too much battery power. But, I thought, rather than just use a GPS program and write down the locations, why not imbed them into the pictures I take?

So that's what I did. Well, not exactly. I did take pictures to get the locations, but I didn't care that much for the pictures, so I took additional pictures at the same locations with my regular camera, and that's what I posted.

It's not quite as simple as it sounds; the location data from the phone is only accurate to within 35 feet as best, and on a half-nile trail, that can be quite a distance off. But I was able to do some tweaking using Google Maps, and the result is HERE.

Except for some preliminary set-up, the whole thing was done between 3:00 and 8:30 p.m. yesterday, and the included taking and preparing the pictures, tweaking the data, and importing everything into the template. And I didn't spend all my time on the project. After all, I do have a few other things on my schedule.

Even though the class is over, I'm planning to do a lot more with these tools in the future.

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