An old-ish video (12 mins) for how to use ArcGIS Online (AGOL). This video shows you how you can upload data to AGOL.
You should each be receiving AGOL account notifications soon. When you do, try to upload a dataset to AGOL using the video above.
Our Assignment 2 and Final assignment will be to build an itinerary based on a travel narrative through the Gulf region and then to visualize it using a StoryMap. An ESRI StoryMap is a multimodal storytelling platform that will allow you to input a map made in AGOL adding other information.
Here is a video describing some basics of a story map. (3 mins) Here is my video of how you can build content blocks in StoryMaps.
A video walk through of some of last year's storymaps and through some of the texts you have to choose from for assignment #2 and the final assignment.
Examples from previous semesters:
Montagu's Trip through Madain al Salih (AlShamsi/AlNoaimi)
Freya Stark: The Gates of Southern Arabia (Budnik/Howarth)
A Voyage Up the Persian Gulf (Hussein)
Take a look at some of the authors below for class on 1 April. Check out their Wikipedia pages.
One of the challenges of teaching in an English-language institution located in the Gulf region and doing a project on the region (especially during a remote semester) is that we turn increasingly to digitized materials and the vast majority of such materials in the public domain are ones that put forward European colonial voices. Furthermore, we encounter persistent misunderstanding of Islam, racist attitudes and justifications of the military and colonial enterprise of the previous century. While these can be useful for a critical evaluation of Arabia was being described in the past and to understand the persistence of such bias today, they can also be confronting and troubling.
Read this short book introduction in preparation for synchronous class next Tuesday as well as the section called "Getting Started" on travel accounts here.
For class you will be doing asynchronous preparation for your final presentation.
You should choose first if you would like to work alone or in pairs. I suggest working in pairs.
Then, you should decide which of the travel narratives of the Arabian peninsula that you will use to build some itineraries and StoryMaps.
Each group will choose one of the books sections mentioned above. You can sign up here.
We will discuss some of the political and historical context of these texts next time in class. The purpose of this exercise is to work with historical texts, locate them in space, but also to tell a story of both their contents and their shortcomings. You are welcome to critique the views that you find within these texts.
Here are the texts you can choose from
1 Freya Stark, The Southern Gates of Arabia (1936), ch 14-end (pages 132-255)
2 Freya Stark, A Winter in Arabia (1940), ("The Diary", pages 29-206)
3 Freya Stark, A Winter in Arabia (1940),"The Journey", pages 207-316)
4 Lady Anne Blunt, A Pilgrimage to Nejd (1881), v 1, ch 1-6 (pages 1-128)
5 Lady Anne Blunt, A Pilgrimage to Nejd (1881), v 1, ch 7-11 (pages 129-end)
6 Theodore and Mabel Bent, Southern Arabia (1900), (pages 1-110)
7 Theodore and Mabel Bent, Southern Arabia (1900), (pages 111-226)
8 Theodore and Mabel Bent, Southern Arabia (1900), (pages 227-341)
9 Theodore and Mabel Bent, Southern Arabia (1900), (pages 342-end)
10 St John Philby, Southern Nejd (1918), (whole book, 80 pages).
For more information about Stark, see this chapter or this book.
For more information about Lady Anne Blunt see this chapter.
1 Choose the text you would like to work on, and your partner. You can sign up here. Be sure to list the author and the section (or pages) you will do. If you don't have a partner, feel free to sign up and leave the person 2 column blank.
In this assignment, with your partner you will be skimming the book you chose, locating the "stops" of the itinerary for the pages that you have been assigned and making them into a structured dataset in Google sheets.
Make sure that you disambiguate and geolocate as many of the places as possible. You do not have to use each of the methods I presented: Geonames, Google and Wikipedia. Use which ever method gives you the best results.
You should begin on the page that you are assigned and end on the page you are assigned.
Publish this dataset on your blog as an embedded Sheet. You will accompany the dataset creation with a short, critical paragraph (500 words max) about the challenges. This short paragraph can be written alone or collectively.
A detailed description of the five steps of the assignment can be found here.