Project Status Update 1

I will probably not be doing too much with the actual building of the story map for a couple more weeks. For now I am re-reading The Price of Glory by Alistair Horne and as well as select parts of The Myth of the Great War by John Mosier and taking notes. Christina Holstein's books Walking Verdun: A Guide to the Battlefield and Fort Vaux: Verdun, are currently in the mail and I should have them this week for further note taking. I have asked Martin, UWEC's GeoSpatial Technology Facilitator, to plot these two maps for me for easy note taking of enemy lines and fort locations.

Looking through story maps on ESRI's website, I found a couple that have a sort of timeline feature that I could use for my project. There is a bar on the bottom of the screen that cycles through different maps and can be organized by date. Using this feature will let me easily convey enemy line progression and changes in fort possession over time. I am not sure how I will be able to fit in the DEM of the battlefield or view shed analyses, maybe at the end of the timeline I could include them without a date attached.

Here are two story map examples I found with the timeline: Comprehensive Timeline Five Year Program 2013-2017
UK UFO Sightings 2009 Timeline

I also found these two examples that don't have a timeline feature but have displayed information in a time sensitive manner: A Timeline of the UK's Tallest Buildings     Syria Timeline

As I continue to take notes I will have a better idea which template and style of project I will want to make. Either going in depth with battlefield lines and making a timeline map, or going more into the history with old pictures and make a more general storymap.

I have also made a 17x11in thank you poster for both the chefs, who cooked us dinner the first half of the trip, and the Salliers Familie, who welcomed us into there home for dinner the last half of the trip. Here are the first drafts, subject to change:

Final Project Idea

I want to make a storymap of for sure Fort Vaux and possibly Fort Douaumont if I have time. Hopefully I will be able to figure out a sort of timeline storymap template from ESRI and go through the history of the fort from construction to present day. Included old maps and pictures I find and ending with present day pictures we took in France and then hopefully include a view shed analysis and the DEM of Fort Vaux that was made from the surveying we did. I plan on getting information from Christina Holstein's Books, The Price of Glory by Alistair Horne, and with maps and books from the library. I have not yet looked in the library or looked into ESRI story map templates too much. I have a three day weekend coming up and plan on doing quite a bit of reading, note taking and story map template experimenting then. I hope to be much farther down the road on this project by next week.

First Story Map Updates

I have decided to update my first story map and make it a fancy pants story map of the overall trip. I am making this along with another storymap that I'll talk about later. So far I have gone through everyone's pictures on the P drive and have begun picking out the ones I want to use and filling out a CSV file. I have about 25 or so pictures so far with captions and gps locations. I plan on including almost every place we visited and may even get to the 99 picture limit. This is going to be a long rest of the semester project and is more of a thing I want to share with my parents and relatives then an academic assignment.

Second Story Map

For my second attempt at a story map I used Google's Tour Builder. I guess its not really a story map anymore its a tour but whatever. I picked the topic of Underground Shelters of the Western Front, since the forts and stollens were my favorite part of the trip. Tour Builder is pretty cool if I wanted to make a overall trip tour but I think for this topic it would have been better to use an ESRI story map. The only problem I had was that I couldn't use lat/long coordinates to place the pictures so I had to find the locations on Google earth and then try by best to place them in the right place. It was easy to use and I find no point in discussing how it was done, just added pictures and text to a map. Here's a link Subterranean Shelters of the Western Front Google Tour Builder

First Story Map

Here is a screenshot of my first story map in builder mode. I had trouble downloading the CSV file template, so I had to just import the pictures straight from Picasa and place them on the map best I could. It is pretty much done at this point. I am just finishing up with some descriptions and fine tuning some picture placements.