So far, we’ve reached out to both the Carleton archives and ResLife concerning what data they might be able to offer us. We’re still waiting for an answer from ResLife, but the archives responded and unfortunately don’t have any information about room draw numbers for past years. They have confirmed that they have kept directory information in print for a certain number of years, which we would have to then transcribe into datasets.
As of now, this process is expected to be quite time consuming, which is forcing us to most likely reduce our sample size from an expected ~100 year period with yearly intervals to possibly four years or more. Analysis of room draw priorities might have to be dropped from the project because of our lack of data.
For now, everything else in the proposal (found here ) seems feasible and is on track for completion. We’ve begun our use of ArcGIS and will most likely start with SketchUp this coming week for the building models.
In the meantime we have mapped the distribution of students for this year as an example, limited to most of the residence halls (excluding town houses and northfield options). Map.
Hi Team,
I would highly encourage you to work with archives and offer to digitize the paper directories for them as part of your project. They can show you how to scan and perform OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to extract plain text data.
As for the 3D work with room draws, as we discussed in class, I think a schematic 3D rendering of the residence halls in CityEngine with floors color coded according to the percentages of classes as in your 2D map would be a really striking visualization. You can use the data we used in class as you base elevation and building footprints.
Look for an email from ESRI giving you access to the training site, and then watch the CityEngine Essentials training videos. The third one in the series (All About Rules) should be the most helpful for the representation.
What platform are you going to use for the final presentation and what do you hope to argue?
For now we’re still planning on making some combination of ARCGis and CityEngine interactive media uploaded onto one of our websites. Our base hypothesis is that upperclassmen tend to flock towards newer buildings. I guess we didn’t really have much of an argument coming into the project, more of a question as to which residential halls are the most appealing. The reasoning towards why isn’t truly logical in my opinion, take Evans being the sophomore hub this year, it simply happens to be. Our goal was to visualize those trends over time and see if we could find something interesting.