Final project thoughts

This course has built on your previous experience with GIS to help you get familiar the current state of webmaps and get you started with putting your maps online. We have covered a number of topics such as creating maps with Carto and Mapbox Studio as well as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This project is intended to be both a venue through which you will demonstrate your new abilities and an end product that is useful for you, whether for the rest of your academic work, for a portfolio, or as a personal project.

Project Contents

Your project will be delivered as a website that is publicly accessible online. This website might contain one map or many maps, one page or many pages.

There is no written portion in the form of a paper. This is an online project, so focus on writing text to put on your project's site. This writing should include at least:

• Who you are.
• A justification for working on this project. Why is it important to you? To the person viewing your project?
• Accountability and methodology. Explain where the data comes from and how you modified that data.

See projects from past years (2016, 2017, 2018, 2019) for an idea of what an acceptable final project looks like.

Assessment

Think of your project as an artifact that is inherently online, and think about the people who will be viewing it. While you are expected to show that you learned new techniques this semester, attempt to make a piece that is interesting and shareable. From this point of view, give priority to telling a compelling story over displaying a massive amount of data or fancy gadgets.

Your project will be judged with the following in mind:

• Skills. Does this project exhibit techniques learned in class?

• Functionality. Does it work?

• Scale. Is the project of an appropriate size and amount of work?

• Novelty. Does the project do something that is not easily accomplished using existing tools? Does the project provide data that was not easily accessible before? If it uses new data, does it also provide a straightforward way for others to use it?

• Usability. Is it something people could find online and use to learn about your project’s topic? Is the topic sufficiently explained?

• Design. Does it look good? Is the map logically themed and laid out?

Generally you should aim to do something that in complexity (both in terms of the data you are using and how it is displayed) and time spent feels like four or five of your assignment submissions this semester. If you have any doubts about your project meeting these criteria, these should be cleared up through the proposal process, otherwise please get in touch immediately!

Submission

You will submit a project description and images for a page which will aggregate the final projects for the entire class. For an example of this page see Advanced GIS - Spring 2019. Submit your project description via this Google Form. The Google Form is your final project submission--there is no Canvas submission for the project.