I have finally reached a point, where I’ve mastered the very difficult to master art of drawing polygons and straight lines on ArcPro. At first whenever I turned off my reference map, you’d see nothing but barren land with only the Imperial Palace visible, but now that the straight lines have been conquered and the residential buildings are being filled in we can see the outline of the city. Since it is nestled between the two rivers, once all the buildings are traced, and I get the rivers down, it’ll finally give viewers the scope of the cities lay out. After that is when I move onto the spreadsheet with my control points, and then the StoryMap which is what I’ve been most excited to get to in this process, since it will scratch my itch and desire to truly write about th Bakumatsu Period.
The residential buildings themselves were a bit tedious to trace, but thankfully I have the power of copy and paste, I was able to copy longer rows of the buildings and paste them back on the rest of the map. I mentally separated the city into thirds around the streets, and now I’ll hopefully be finished by next week and I can set the map aside for a while. I’ve learned after years of doing assignments like these sometimes it’s good to just put something to the side for a while before jumping back in. I’m also still a week ahead of schedule thanks to Dave Rumsey already having the map of Kyoto georeferenced, that means I don’t have to rush through the rest of the tracing process. I am thankfully going to have an extra week at the end of the semester before presentations to really edit the map and straighten things out. Getting to the next phase is really going to be exciting since it’s more traditional research which is going to be a nice change of pace.
It really is satisfying to finally be able to turn off the map layer that I’ve been tracing and begin to see the city itself really come to life. The rivers are going to be the hard part, and I think that’s going to have to be something that I go to Dr. Saladin for help for, since I’m not exactly sure what drawing tool would be best to use it since it does snake around the city. The bridges are important for some of the biggest incidents and events during the period, and since they go across the river the river is pivotal to include. Still, while I’m not exactly sure how I’m going to draw it appropriately, I guess you can say I’ll cross that BRIDGE when I come to it.
On a more personal note, I am very happy to say I did get offered the job at the Constitution Center, and yes the National Treasure jokes were abundant when I first told people. I’ll be in visitor engagement and education, so I’ll be moving to another museum in Philadelphia with a great reputation. I was told by the wonderful people who interviewed me, that all the museums in Philadelphia are always in contact and are recommending people for positions, so all I have to do it do the job I know I can do, and who knows, the future is bright.
Leave a Reply