IT assists in Newark Multimedia Mapping Project
On Friday, October 9, April Veness, associate
professor in the Department of Geography,
unveiled her students’ discovery
learning project: Newark, Delaware: A Story
of People and Place. Special guests Newark
Mayor Vance Funk III and dean of students,
George Brelsford also spoke at the
seminar.
The multimedia Mapping Project involved
collecting, sharing, and crafting stories
about life in Newark from 1900 to the
present. Data for the project came from the
Library’s archives, Newark residents,
and international students. Moving the
multimedia content to a digital platform
makes the stories accessible to anyone with a
computer.
Ben Mearns, GIS specialist in IT Research
& Data Management Services, provided
comprehensive GIS and Web support through
spring and summer 2009 to enable Veness'
class to fully develop their project.
Dick Sacher, IT CS&S, and L.
Rebecca Johnson Melvin, Special Collections,
Morris Library served as advisors for the
project.
The Mapping Project was Veness' first foray
into a Web and GIS project, and she relied on
RDMS to guide the technical vision of the
project’s outcome. The range of
services Mearns delivered included guiding
the selection of appropriate technologies,
providing a web development environment,
actual web development assistance, data
transformation, and project migration. Beyond
designing a technically feasible plan, Mearns
also had to take into account students'
established skills and expectations.


Veness set the bar high by modeling her
student-created site on those at the cutting
edge of web mapping. The type of
animated maps she cited almost exclusively
used Adobe Flash, the standard for animation
on the web.


Many
students came to the course with some ability
to use the desktop GIS software package
ArcGIS. Others were familiar with traditional
web development, which entails use of HTML
and CSS. Coincidentally, the student
most experienced with web development had a
keen interest in working with Adobe Flash.
With student/teacher expectations and skills
in mind, geographic data and maps were
manipulated with ArcGIS Desktop, web services
were exposed with ArcGIS Server, and the
Adobe Flex* web mapping API displayed the
maps on the front end.
The Mapping Project site has 3 chapters:
Bygone Days, a Sense of Place, and Collective
Identities. Bygone Days covers Newark from
1900 to 1960 showing maps of the area
overlaid with icons for text information,
videos, audio interviews, and pictures. A
Sense of Place shows the 2009 map of Newark
with information on the location of the
greatest concentration of rental properties
for people ages 18-21 and the concentration
of quality-of-life crimes in rental
housing. The Collective Identities
chapter shows where the greatest
concentration of international students lies
in Newark and contains an inset map showing
the countries from which international
students come to Delaware.
You can view the Newark Mapping Project at
http://www.udel.edu/Geography/Newark/
*According to Wikipedia, “Adobe Flex is
a software development kit released by Adobe
Systems for the development and deployment of
cross-platform rich Internet applications
based on the Adobe Flash platform.”
