Lesson 9 Lab Visual Guide

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Lesson 9 Lab Visual Guide

  1. Introduction to ArcGIS Online (AGOL)
  2. Create You Working Directory
  3. Adding Data to a Map
  4. Styling Your Map
  5. Creating a Choropleth
  6. Configuring Pop-Ups
  7. Sharing Your Map
  8. Creating a StoryMap
  9. Sharing Your StoryMap

  1. Project Data

    The following sections 2 - 7 illustrate the process of using ArcGIS Online to create an interactive map using a sample dataset. The dataset that is used to illustrate the process should not be selected for this assignment. You will need to collect your own data for this project. 

  2. Introduction to ArcGIS Online (AGOL)

    To begin, open the Canada_COVID_19_022622.csv(link is external) Excel file. This file has multiple fields (columns) of data for each province in Canada. It was created by selecting a group of records from a CSV file downloaded from the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), and contains data related to the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths for Canadian provinces as of February 26, 2022. Take note of the column header names. The column highlighted in green box in Figure 9.1 is named “prname” which stands for province name. ArcGIS Online needs to know the geography to locate your data on a map. For example, if you are mapping individual states of the United States, then you would need a column titled, for example, “states” that contains rows listing the different state names.

    The most important component of this Excel sheet is the prname column– AGOL will automatically recognize and map several geographies, such as States, Countries, Zipcodes, and Coordinates (lat/long). You may choose to map another geography (e.g., counties, census tracts, block groups) for your own data, but using one of these other geographies will not be covered here.

    screen capture of the Excel file used for Lab 9
    Visual Guide Figure 9.1: Lab 9 Tutorial Starting Excel file.
    Credit: Harrison Cole © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0(link is external)

  3. Create Your Working Directory

    Log in to AGOL using your PSU ID, then click Content on the navigation bar at the top of your screen. The Content environment appears. You will create an empty folder that will be used to organize all data and maps related to your StoryMaps project. To create a new folder, look in the upper left-hand corner of the Content environment. There is a Folders heading. Click on the small + folder icon to the right of the heading to create a new folder. Title this folder “GEOG486_StoryMap”.

  4. Adding Data to a Map

    Now that you have a place to store your data, click on the Map button on the navigation bar up top. You should be taken to a screen that looks fairly similar to the Vector Tile Style Editor (VTSE) interface, but with only one map and different tools (shown below in Figure 9.3). This environment is called the Map Viewer (although you can use it to do a whole lot more than just view maps). Click on the + Add button on the left of your screen, then select Add layer from file and select your downloaded CSV.

    Add it as a hosted feature layer (don’t worry about what this means for now), then on the next screen, make sure that all the fields are selected. After you confirm the fields that you want to include (all of them), change the Location Settings to Addresses or place names. AGOL can automatically extract location data from tables, but we need to specify which part of the world we’re concerned with or else we’ll have a map showing the cities of Yukon, Oklahoma and Ontario, California. So, open Advanced location settings and change the Region to Canada. Under that, select Location information is in one field. Set the Address or Place field “prname” (Figure 9.2).

    screen capture of the locartion settings window described in the text above
    Visual Guide Figure 9.2: Adding the COVID-19 CSV to your working directory.
    Credit: Harrison Cole © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0(link is external)

    When you have successfully added the layer to the map, you’ll notice that your data is represented as a red dot at the center of each province (Figure 9.3).

    screen capture showing a map of Canada and the U.S.A. with the COVID data successfully added
    Visual Guide Figure 9.3: COVID-19 data successfully added to the AGOL map.
    Credit: Fritz Kessler © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0(link is external)

  5. Styling Your Map

    Even though the data in our spreadsheet can potentially be represented as areas (i.e. as a choropleth map), we don’t currently have the correct data for us to map the provinces as areas. So for now, we will explore how to map the data as point symbols representing each province.

    More specifically, we’ll be mapping the provinces using proportional circles. The following series of steps outlines this selection process. Along the right-hand side of the Map Viewer is a series of icons. The topmost icon is the Properties option that will allow you to alter the map properties. Click the Properties button if the panel isn’t open already. The Properties panel appears. Under the Symbology header, choose the Edit layer style option. Begin by choosing an attribute from the .csv spreadsheet to map. Under the Choose attributes header, click on the + Field button and select the “totalcases” attribute that contains the total number of Covid-19 cases by province. By now, you should understand why proportional symbolization rather than choropleth symbolization is appropriate to map total count data. To complete this step, select the Add button at the bottom (Figure 9.4).

    screen capture showing the selection of totalcases
    Visual Guide Figure 9.4: Choosing an attribute to visualize.
    Credit: Fritz Kessler © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0(link is external)

    Under the Pick a style header, select the Counts and Amounts (size) option. This option proportionally associates each province’s data value with a differently sized circle. Larger circles imply greater data values.

    There are other symbol options that you can explore under the Style options button– feel free to explore them, but come back to Counts and Amounts (size) eventually. Click on Style options and experiment with the various options for changing the appearance of the symbols (Figure 9.5).

    screen capture showing the style options for the symbol properties
    Visual Guide Figure 9.5: Changing symbol properties.
    Credit: Fritz Kessler © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0(link is external)

    You’ve made some good progress at this point, so you should save your work. To save your map, click on the Save and open icon found along the left-hand listing of tool in the Map Viewer. On the options that appear, choose the Save As option. Make sure to give your map an informative title. Optionally, add some tags that will help others find your map, and give a short summary of the map. Make sure that you select the save location as your 486-StoryMap folder. Then, choose the Save button.

    Figure 9.6 shows the final Canada COVID-19 map showing the total number of COVID-19 cases by province ending February 26, 2022. Note that there are several design changes I have made to the map. Try to replicate these changes on your own using the options found in the Properties panel, as well as other locations. The changes are as follows:

    • set the fill color of the proportional circles to semi-transparent red and added a contrasting outline color.
    • added province labels to the proportional circles.
    • added a different basemap style (the Human Geography helps to visually promote the appearance of the colored proportional circles).
    screen capture of a map showing the data represented with proportional symbols
    Visual Guide Figure 9.6: Final map with styled proportional symbols.
    Credit: Fritz Kessler © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0(link is external)

  6. Creating a Choropleth

    In the previous section, even though you worked with area-based data (data assigned to a province), the map displayed proportional circles centered over each province. A CSV doees not store the geometry of the dataset’s features (i.e. lines or polygons), so if you want to show your data as a line- or area-based symbol, you need to upload an additional file that includes the geography. Here, we will be using shapefiles.

    Download the “Canada_Provinces.zip(link is external).” This zipped file contains the shapefile of the Canadian provincial boundaries that you’ll be using in this example. Return to the map that you made earlier and hide the proportional symbol layer by clicking the eye icon in the Layers pane (NOTE! it is important that you keep all your layers in the same map so that you’ll save time in a much later section of this tutorial). Add the .zip file the same way that you added the CSV earlier (you’ll probably want to include your initials at the end of the file name). Once you add the layer, it might take a few minutes to process, but you should eventually see the province polygons appear on your map (Figure 9.7).

    screen capture showing the map with polygons of the Canadian provinces
    Visual Guide Figure 9.7: Map with province polygons added.
    Credit: Fritz Kessler © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0(link is external)

    Now, because we need to combine the shapefile and the CSV into a single file, we will perform what is known as a join operation. This process combines files that share at least one identical value in their attribute tables. Luckily, we have exactly what we need in the datasets you’ve added to the map so far (this isn’t always the case in real-world scenarios). Open the attribute table of the COVID case dataset by clicking on the context menu (the ellipsis) in the Layers panel, then click Show table. Note the values that you see in the “prname” field. Now, open the attribute table for your newly-added polygon layer and find the “name” field (Figure 9.8). These fields in each layer share identical values, so AGOL will match each the row containing “Alberta” in the CSV with the row containing “Alberta” in the shapefile. In this way, our COVID data will be matched with the correct polygon feature.

    screen capture showing the attribute table for the province shapefile
    Visual Guide Figure 9.8: Attribute table for the province shapefile.
    Credit: Fritz Kessler © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0(link is external)

    This next part has to happen precisely as described here:

    • To “join” your two data files, begin by selecting the Analysis button on the right of your screen.
    • Click on the Tools icon, then choose Join Features.
    • Figure 9.9 shows the files that are used to specify the target layer and the join layer. The target layer is shapefile while the join layer is the CSV that has the data value to join to the target layer.
    • Sets the join to match on attributes from each file where the target field contains the province name found in the shapefile (“name”) while the join field contains the province name found in the CSV (prname).
    • Specifiy the file name for the new map layer and its storage location (486_StoryMap).
    screen capture showing the suggested settings for the layer join operation
    Visual Guide Figure 9.9: Correct settings for layer join operation.
    Credit: Fritz Kessler © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0(link is external)

    Once you have completed setting all the options, choose the RUN button at the bottom. To complete the join, you may have to wait a few minutes for ArcGIS Online to process all the data.

    Once the join process has completed, you can choose to map one of the COVID-19 attributes. To map your COVID-19 data, look in the Styles option (icon listing along the right-hand side of the map environment). In my case, I chose to map the “ratedeaths” attribute and displaying that variable as a series of blues where light blue represents high COVID-19 death rates and dark blue represents low COVID-19 death rates (Figure 9.10).

    screen capture showing the finished choropleth map of Canadian provinces
    Visual Guide Figure 9.10: Finished choropleth map.
    Credit: Fritz Kessler © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0(link is external)

    Now is a good time to save your work!

  7. Configuring pop-ups

    While we have a map that looks pretty good on its own, we should keep in mind that this is an interactive map, so users will be clicking on features. Go ahead and click on a province, and a window should appear that looks like the one in Figure 9.11.

    screen capture showing an unedited pop-up window of data for Saskatchewan
    Visual Guide Figure 9.11: Unedited pop-up window.
    Credit: Fritz Kessler © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0(link is external)

    There is a lot of information being presented here, and almost all of it is either confusing or not useful for most users. Fortunately, we can change what is displayed in these windows. For this next part, keep the pop-up window open.

    Start by clicking the Pop-ups button on the right side of your screen. Double check that you have pop-ups enabled, and that you’re editing pop-ups for the correct layer (your join layer). You should see a section titled Fields list. This is one of two content fields in your pop-up window (the other one is Title which we’ll get to in a minute). Note that it says “76/76 fields”. This means that each pop-up window is displaying all 76 attribute fields in your layer’s attribute table. This is not terribly useful, so click on Fields list, and in the resulting section click Select fields. Now, we don’t want to manually deselect all 76 layers, so the fastest way to do this is by clicking Select all, then Deselect all. All the fields in the open pop-up should disappear.

    screen capture showing a pop-up window with no information for Saskatchewan
    Visual Guide Figure 9.12: Pop-up window with no fields being displayed.
    Credit: Fritz Kessler © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0(link is external)

    A pop-up with no information isn’t terribly useful either, so let’s add some fields back. The name of the selected province might be helpful, so select the field “name” as well as “name_fr” so that the French spelling of the province name is included as well. Another good field to include for propriety would be “date”. Next, all “totalcases”, “ratecases_total”, “numdeaths” and “ratedeaths”. Your pop-up should now look like Figure 9.13. When finished, click Done.

    screen capture showing a pop-up window showing our chosen information for Saskatchewan
    Visual Guide Figure 9.13: Pop-up window with correct fields displayed.
    Credit: Fritz Kessler © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0(link is external)

    The amount of information being displayed is now much more reasonable, but the formatting is not terribly appealing. “ratecases_total”, for example, would be much better displayed as “Case rate per 100,000”. We have two options to address this.

    The first option is to edit the display name of the field itself. To do so, click the Fields button on the right, then locate the field whose display name you wish to change. Let’s start with “totalcases”. Click it, and edit the name in the Manage field pane that appears (Figure 9.14). Change it to “Total cases”. Then, change “ratecases_total” to “Case rate per 100,000”. While we’re at it, change Significant digits to 0 Decimal places to further simplify our pop-up (Figure 9.14). Finally, change “date” to “Date”, change the Date format to include the name of the month (e.g. February 25, 2022), and un-toggle Show time, as that information isn’t meaningful for our purposes. The advantages of changing field names via the Fields panel are that the field name will display consistently across various locations, and that you can use the field table layout currently in your pop-up window.

    screen capture showing a pop-up window where you set the display name of a field
    Visual Guide Figure 9.14: Configuring a field’s display name.
    Credit: Fritz Kessler © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0(link is external)

    The second option is to use an expression. I think that the names of provinces are better represented as standalone items rather than in a table with other items, so return to the Pop-ups pane, click on Fields again, and click the x next to “name” and “name_fr”. Next, close the Fields list, and click + Add content underneath. Choose Text. In the editor that appears, type “Province name / Nom de la province:”. Then hold Shift on your keyboard and press Enter/Return. With your cursor directly uderneath the first line of text, click on the { } button, and choose “name”. Then type “ / “, then “name_fr”/ (Figure 9.15). (I also did some additional text formatting– see if you can replicate it on your own). Click OK.

    screen capture showing a pop-up window where you set the display name of a field using an expression
    Visual Guide Figure 9.15: Adding a name field using an expression.
    Credit: Fritz Kessler © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0(link is external)

    Repeat this process using “name_fr” and preceding it with “Nom de la province: “. Click on the 6 dots next to the “name” Text content, and drag it to the top, so that it’s underneath Title. Drag the “name_fr” Text under “name”. Finally, click on the Title component, delete the existing text, and replace it with “COVID-19 Data by Province” (Figure 9.16).

    screen capture showing a fully formatted pop-up window of data for Saskatchewan
    Visual Guide Figure 9.16: Formatted pop-up.
    Credit: Fritz Kessler © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0(link is external)

  8. Sharing Your Map

    Sharing your maps will allow you to show your work to others, but more importantly for this lab, it will allow you to embed them into your StoryMaps. To share your maps that you created, select the Share map icon along the left-edge of the Map Viewer. The Share icon brings up the Share window (Figure 9.17) that allows you to specify how the map is shared. Presently, only share with this Organization (Penn State University).

    screen capture showing the Sharing permissions pop-up window
    Visual Guide Figure 9.17: Updating sharing permissions.
    Credit: Fritz Kessler © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0(link is external)

    When you click Save, you’ll probably see a window with a message that says “The shared item(s) reference other items that may not be visible…” While you changed the sharing permissions of your map, you still need to change the permissions for your data. Click Review sharing, then in the next window, click Update sharing to synchronize the sharing permissions for all of your layers. You can change their sharing status later via the Content section of the website.

    You now have the basic skills to work in AGOL. Feel free to explore the additional style options, try uploading different data types, and run some additional analyses. AGOL is great for sharing data and making interactive maps, but it does have significant limitations when it comes to data management, symbolization, and analysis. So sometimes it makes more sense to create or edit data in ArcGIS Pro, then upload that data to ArcGIS Online for visualization and sharing– keep that in mind if you encounter a roadblock.

    Remember that your StoryMap needs to include a minimum of 3 maps.

  9. Creating a StoryMap

    Once you feel comfortable with the Map Viewer interface, it’s time to move on to StoryMaps. Either on the AGOL homepage or in the Map Viewer, you’ll see a 3 x 3 matrix of dots in the upper-right corner of your screen. This opens the App Launcher. Click on ArcGIS StoryMaps. On the StoryMaps homepage, click on the green Create story button on the right, and select Start from scratch. This will open the Story Builder interface (Figure 9.18). You are now ready to start telling your story.

    screen capture showing a new blank StoryMap window
    Visual Guide Figure 9.18: A new, blank StoryMap.
    Credit: Fritz Kessler © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0(link is external)

    Every element of a StoryMaps can be custom designed with typefaces, colors, background textures, etc. To access the design palette for any StoryMaps element, click on the Design button along the menu ribbon at the top of the StoryMaps environment. You have a few options here– let’s change the Cover to Top and the Theme to Slate. When you’re done, click the X at the top of the pane.

    To add additional elements (called story blocks) to your StoryMap, scroll down and either click on Tell your story… to add text, or click the + button next to it in order to add a block. Choose the Map block (Figure 9.19).

    screen capture showing the addition of a map story block
    Visual Guide Figure 9.19: Adding a map story block.
    Credit: Fritz Kessler © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0(link is external)

    You’ll be taken to a screen where you should see the Canada COVID map(s) that you made earlier. Choose the map that you want to insert into the story, then in the next screen (Figure 9.20), make any necessary adjustments regarding layer visibility and map functionality. If you notice some additional changes that you’d like to make, such as including an additional layer, changing layer draw order, or changing a layer’s symbolization, then you can click the Edit in ArcGIS button at the bottom-left of the screen. For now, hide all but one of the layers by clicking the eye icon next to their titles. If everything looks good, click Save.

    screen capture showing the selection of map layers to be shown in the StoryMap
    Visual Guide Figure 9.20: Editing the map before adding it to the StoryMap.
    Credit: Fritz Kessler © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0(link is external)

    The process for adding and editing additional blocks is fairly similar and straightforward. Definitely experiment with various different blocks and layout options, and take a look at tutorials to learn about more features. Of particular note is the Sidecar block. This allows you to have text and media scroll over a map, or other media. This is a very common feature in StoryMaps, as well as other data journalism features, sometimes called “scrollytelling”.

    Making your sidecar block transition between information seamlessly is pretty easy. To start, add a sidecar block to your StoryMap. I chose the Floating layout, but it doesn’t really matter for this. Near the top of the new sidecar block, click + Add, and choose Map. Select your Canada COVID map from earlier. You’ll see the same interface that you used to add a normal map a minute ago. As before, hide (the eye icon) all but the choropleth layer. Adjust the positioning of your data appropriately, then click Save. Now, at the bottom of the sidecar interface, click on the ellipsis button at the bottom-right of the first slide (which is at the bottom-left of the interface). Select Duplicate. You’ll get a second map slide with the exact same data and layout at the first slide. On this second slide, click Edit (pencil icon) at the top of the map. Now, hide the layer that you used in the first slide, and un-hide your proportional symbol layer. Click Save.

    screen capture showing the addition of a sidecar block
    Visual Guide Figure 9.21: Working with a sidecar block.
    Credit: Fritz Kessler © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0(link is external)

    Back in the Sidecar interface, click on the first slide and add some helpful text by clicking on Continue your story… Add some contextual information to the text box on the left. Then click on the second slide and do the same. Now when you preview your map, scrolling down the page should result in a seamless transition between the two data views, with the text cards moving past on the left.

    screen capture showing a sidecar block with contextual information for the map
    Visual Guide Figure 9.22: Slide 1 of the finished sidecar block.
    Credit: Fritz Kessler © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0(link is external)

    This is the basic process of working with sidecars, but you have a number of ways to mix up how your data is presented, like adding images, video, focusing on different areas of your maps, filtering the data of different layers and so on.

    Note the attribution footer at the bottom of the interface— you may want to use it in your project. Also, periodically check how your work looks by clicking the Preview button at the top of the screen. This will allow you to see how your layout looks to the people that you’ll share it with.

    Some general guidance when designing your StoryMap: take the colors that you used in your map, and re-use them in some of your StoryMap elements. Not too much:

  10. Sharing your StoryMap

    Once you have completed your StoryMap design and are ready to submit it, you will need to Publish it. To publish your StoryMap, click Publish > at the top of the screen. Change “Who can see this…” to Organization, and if you’d like, edit the Story details accordingly, but this isn’t necessary for the assignment.