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a fun distraction
Because my thesis chapter on the Swedish steatite (soapstone) artefacts in our museums is organised by Province, I thought it would be nice to include the Province borders on the map showing the locations the artefacts were found. However, I am using GoogleEarth for my GIS stuff (because I have it, and I haven't made the time to find out if I have access to a good GIS program through Durham, and I don't want to take the time to learn it if I do--those things have steep learning curves--I played enough with one at UTAS and another at LTU to know that they aren't exactly intuitive, and GoogleEarth is pretty much).
The downside is that while Google earth will show national borders, they no longer have Swedish Provinces. My first work around was downloading an .svg file of all of the Swedish Provinces, and, for each figure I would turn the relevant Province dark brown, and leave the rest off white, and have a small inset showing where in Sweden the close-up map is.
That seemed plenty, for weeks. Yesterday I got far enough along in building my spreadsheet of artefacts to have consistent names for what sort of artefact each is, what time period (if any) it is recorded as being, lat-long, etc. that I thought I would see if I could import that into google, and if so, what happens.
It turns out that one can then set it to have special symbols based on one field, and symbol colour based on another, automatically. I had been using a four-symbol system all along [1 = star (good location, V age), 2 = circle (parish location, V age), 3= diamond (good location, other age), 4 = square (parish location, other age)], but those symbols in Google Earth came only in white.
But if you import a csv file and apply those rules, suddenly one can get a range of colours for those shapes (red = Stone Age, pink = Bronze Age, Blue = Viking Age, light blue = Iron Age, green = Middle Ages, and yellow = not specified). I like the effect. A lot. I may also try doing the colour coding instead for types of artefacts, but I haven't decided yet.
Before I was putting each artefact into google earth as I wrote it up for the thesis, and had visible on the map at once only those artefacts that go with a given figure. However, most figures have the map at a zoom where one or more artefacts in a neighbouring Province would also be visible. When the CSV file imported it let me automatically group artefacts in folders based on their symbol. Before I had been grouping them in folders based on their Province. This means it would be considerably harder with the new version to have only the artefacts from a single Province visible at a time, and it occurs to me that it isn't actually needed--there is value in seeing where nearby artefacts that happen to be over the border are with respect to the ones which appear on this figure.
But then, to make it even more clear that the map symbols that don't have arrows attached to their photo and museum number aren't included in a given figure because they belong to a different Province, it would be nice to show those borders.
So today I spent a chunk of the day in CorelDraw, taking one to four provinces at a time and exporting their outlines as a png file. Then I imported the image into GoogleEarth as an Overlay. I first tried the whole country's worth of Provinces at once. However, we get a little too far north, which makes for a bit of distortion for image overlay--if you get a good fit to the borders and coastline in the north then they don't line up properly in the south, and vice versa.
But doing them a little at a time, I was able to get a pretty good placement, and now I have all of the borders imported into GoogleEarth, and I am pretty happy with the result.
PS does anyone know how to get the DW image embedding working with images from Google drive? In theory if I past the image address into the url spot in this code (with pointy brackets before and after)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kv1lw5aLFhzGR44WIj8DsgibrtWd0TPO/preview
Neither did it work if I used the code as google provided it.
The downside is that while Google earth will show national borders, they no longer have Swedish Provinces. My first work around was downloading an .svg file of all of the Swedish Provinces, and, for each figure I would turn the relevant Province dark brown, and leave the rest off white, and have a small inset showing where in Sweden the close-up map is.
That seemed plenty, for weeks. Yesterday I got far enough along in building my spreadsheet of artefacts to have consistent names for what sort of artefact each is, what time period (if any) it is recorded as being, lat-long, etc. that I thought I would see if I could import that into google, and if so, what happens.
It turns out that one can then set it to have special symbols based on one field, and symbol colour based on another, automatically. I had been using a four-symbol system all along [1 = star (good location, V age), 2 = circle (parish location, V age), 3= diamond (good location, other age), 4 = square (parish location, other age)], but those symbols in Google Earth came only in white.
But if you import a csv file and apply those rules, suddenly one can get a range of colours for those shapes (red = Stone Age, pink = Bronze Age, Blue = Viking Age, light blue = Iron Age, green = Middle Ages, and yellow = not specified). I like the effect. A lot. I may also try doing the colour coding instead for types of artefacts, but I haven't decided yet.
Before I was putting each artefact into google earth as I wrote it up for the thesis, and had visible on the map at once only those artefacts that go with a given figure. However, most figures have the map at a zoom where one or more artefacts in a neighbouring Province would also be visible. When the CSV file imported it let me automatically group artefacts in folders based on their symbol. Before I had been grouping them in folders based on their Province. This means it would be considerably harder with the new version to have only the artefacts from a single Province visible at a time, and it occurs to me that it isn't actually needed--there is value in seeing where nearby artefacts that happen to be over the border are with respect to the ones which appear on this figure.
But then, to make it even more clear that the map symbols that don't have arrows attached to their photo and museum number aren't included in a given figure because they belong to a different Province, it would be nice to show those borders.
So today I spent a chunk of the day in CorelDraw, taking one to four provinces at a time and exporting their outlines as a png file. Then I imported the image into GoogleEarth as an Overlay. I first tried the whole country's worth of Provinces at once. However, we get a little too far north, which makes for a bit of distortion for image overlay--if you get a good fit to the borders and coastline in the north then they don't line up properly in the south, and vice versa.
But doing them a little at a time, I was able to get a pretty good placement, and now I have all of the borders imported into GoogleEarth, and I am pretty happy with the result.
PS does anyone know how to get the DW image embedding working with images from Google drive? In theory if I past the image address into the url spot in this code (with pointy brackets before and after)
img src="IMAGE URL" alt="ALT TEXT", it should show up here. I have done this with images on FB many times, but those links all die after a week or three, and they don't stay in the post here. But if I use the address I can find for the Google Image, it doesn't work, even if I copy the one from the "embed this image" code that I managed to find on the google drive page for the image, which is this one:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kv1lw5aLFhzGR44WIj8DsgibrtWd0TPO/preview
Neither did it work if I used the code as google provided it.