The past few weeks have been eventful for the Mapping Morton Village project, since Autumn’s blog post on 2/11, we have completed all of the content for the website, and continued working on the interactive map. Mapbox has been a bit of a struggle for us, as we could not get the data for Morton Village to appear on our map. We wanted multiple layers to show the work done during each year of excavation (1980s, 2008-2014). Within these layers we would have the content that we have been working on (see Autumn’s blog post) available as pop-ups on specific pit features or structures. We were unsure how to pull our shapefile layers from Mapbox into our website’s code to create these ‘year’ layers, anything we tried we could not see our data on the map. We researched extensively to try to find an answer to our problem, and were not having much luck until Autumn posted on the GIS Stack Exchange site with our issues and a few users were able to help us.
Our problem had been that we were trying to pull the tilesets, which are vector data, directly into our code, which will not work. To pull tilesets into the code, we needed to create an editor project in Mapbox Classic for each of our year layers, containing the structure and feature data as geoJSON files. Once we figured this out, I converted our shapefiles into geoJSON, and Autumn was able to adjust the code and add the map-id for each of our editor projects. We can toggle these layers on and off in the map, and we have also put content with each of their corresponding pit features/structures (see photos below). This makes things a little easier, because we have both the pit features and structures in the same layer (which we didn’t before) and we can easily format the data in the Mapbox Editor project for each layer and it automatically updates on our map (styling, descriptions, etc.). We have made a lot of progress in the past few weeks and we are excited about continuing to build the Mapping Morton Village interactive map!
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