Project Update March 10

Since my presentation and most recent project update, I have made a lot of progress on really narrowing down my idea, and truly understanding what I would like to do. 

I had originally hoped to create a moving map that follows along a timeline, which shows the birth places of NHL players, related to what year they played their first NHL game in. I am still hoping to get an appointment with the GIS experts here at Guelph, which many of us know has not been the easiest task. Since then, I have been playing around with a couple other mapping programs. Prof. Ross introduced me to geocommons, a mapping website, that allows you to transfer data to be geocoded into a map. After playing around and experimenting with this website, I was able to transfer a chunk of my Microsoft excel data, into map form. However, it seems as though the scaling of the mapping software is incorrect, as I tried to map only Canadian sights, and they were plotted basically all over the globe. I have also made a few google Earth maps. In case my moving map idea does not work out, I will make 10 separate maps, that plots individually where players came from every 10 years. (1920, 1930, 1940…) all the way until 2010. In this case, I wil make a website where you can quickly click through these maps, along with an analysis of trends and statistics.

That’s all for now!