Mapping on Kepler

This week we worked on mapping historical data sets of interviews with Enslaved people in Alabama onto a software known as Kepler. To be honest, after last week working with Voyant and now Kepler, I like data and text visualizations, but wow am I bad at them.

The general work process for Kepler is to upload your data set, and then you can adjust the layers to a handful of ways of displaying the data: points show dots on the map, clusters show dots that change in size based on amounts of evidence, heat mats show the amount of evidence using different amounts of glowing centers, and then we also did a strange one called arcs that compares multiple locations (pictured above).

While it’s fun to see on the map, I find it really hard to use the data like this for more than just decorations. Perhaps people more visually inclined, or those who work better with statistics, would find this program a lot more helpful. Perhaps my judgment is clouded with negativity because the program was malfunctioning to the point where it would not export the maps as images at all. I found it frustrating to be working with a software that had a steeper learning curve and then the software didn’t even work properly.

I’ll try my best to continue learning data visualization and mapping, but for now I’d pretty much only recommend it to people who really like maps, and statistics, because it uses a lot of terms and concepts from those that are necessary to use the software.

 

Last Edited: 10/14/2022