Mapping Morton Village: Creating the Interactive Map

Creating the Interactive Map

For the past two weeks, as Autumn Beyer worked on coding our site, I have been working on the interactive map for our joint CHI Fellowship project – Mapping Morton Village. I had some problems at the beginning, including a computer that would not function and some confusion as to the format required for the map data, which have both been remedied. We are using Mapbox to create the maps, which requires the maps to be georeferenced (i.e. assigning real world coordinates to the map). I already had shapefiles for the map – however our map was not georeferenced to real-world coordinates, but to our own site grid. I contacted the co-project director for the Morton Village Archaeological Project, Dr. Michael Conner at Dickson Mounds Museum in Lewistown, IL and he was able to send me georeferenced shapefiles (Thanks Mike!).

Thanks to Mike, I now have all the georeferenced files from that site that we will include in our Mapping Morton Village project. Once I had the georeferenced files for our site map, I was able to upload them to Mapbox.com (see image below). 

I am still learning how exactly to use Mapbox and create our interactive map and its multiple layers, but I’m excited about the progress we have made this early in the semester. Kudos to Autumn for figuring out the bootstrap theme and coding the website for our project!

What’s next for Mapping Morton Village?

Over the next month, Autumn and I will continue to develop the interactive map of the Morton Village archaeological site and write the content for the interactive features. If you have any questions or comments please comment here!