Latest Contributions by JosephKerski

I wanted to share several new resources about careers in GIS that are now available that I believe will be useful to students, educators, career counselors, and others. First, the folks at the career and employment resource, The Muse, created a fascinating node on Esri with interviews of young people working here! I created several new videos on my YouTube channel under “Career” such as a new series of 4 “career pathways in geotechnologies” videos, beginning here.  I also created a “Top 5 skills you need to be successful in GIS” series beginning here, a Geographer is a Green job video, and others. The career development zone on the Esri EdCommunity page includes Esri career posters, a summary of the blog essays we have written on careers, links to industries that use GIS, some GIS heroes, videos of those who use GIS on the job as firefighter, city manager, and in other fields, and much more. I also tell students to frequently check the job openings on www.geosearch.com, gisjobs.org, and our own Esri openings on http://www.esri.com/careers as they think about their future. Esri also maintains an interesting  student opportunity page and a jobs zone on GeoNet is useful too.  Interested in talking with our staff about career opportunities?   See this page for upcoming events where our university recruitment team will be.  Feel free to contact the university recruitment folks on university @ esri.com.  Read this blog and the Esri Higher Education Facebook community to find out where the education outreach team will be speaking in the near future. ... View more

10 Tips for making great story maps  -  https://blogs.esri.com/esri/arcgis/2016/10/11/10-essential-steps-story-map-success/  I hope this article is useful to many of you.  --Joseph Kerski ... View more

10 Tips for making great story maps  -  https://blogs.esri.com/esri/arcgis/2016/10/11/10-essential-steps-story-map-success/  ... View more

5 Practices That Make Life Easier in ArcGIS Online  45 62 128 ArcGIS Online is an easy-to-use cloud-based Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) Geographic Information System.  I have found that the following five practices have made my work in ArcGIS Online a bit easier, and I trust they will do so for you and your students, as well.  I named them practices to encourage you to practice using them.  If you do, I think that you–and your students–will have a better experience in using these tools, data sets, and maps that are now literally at your fingertips. 1. Use folders.  As I explain in this video, using folders is an excellent way for you to keep your projects organized in ArcGIS Online.  Don’t place everything in the “root” folder.  Make it a habit to store the results of your analysis, which are stored as map layers, in a folder that you have created for one single project.  Periodically go through your folders and delete maps, services, and layers that you no longer need.  Along these lines, be a good digital citizen and clean up after yourself, by unsharing anything that does not need to be shared, with the general public, and organization, or a group. 2.  Take a few seconds to name your data layers descriptively so that you can find them in the future.  This is particularly important when you are running the analysis tools and making many layers in the process.  For example, I include the value of my buffer in my proximity layers, such as “Buffer of Broad Street Well 500 meters”.  And don’t neglect populating your metadata with description and tags.  Spending a little time with these practices will save you hours in the future in finding your data quickly.  You will also help others to find your data if you are sharing, and thus encourage the use of your resources and foster collaboration. 3.  To transfer content between folders in your own ArcGIS Online organizational account, and between ArcGIS Online organizational accounts, or in Portal, use the ArcGIS Online Assistant.  It also allows you to view the underlying JSON for any item in ArcGIS Online or your Portal, and you can modify the URLs for services in web maps and registered applications. 4.  To more effectively manage your ArcGIS Online organizational account, use the Geo-Jobe tools.  The folks at Geo-Jobe offer severe educational discounts, as well.  You can copy groups, add multiple users, change permissions, view item dependencies, and do so much more, with these tools. 5.  Use the “My Stories” zone to manage your story maps. Yes, you can see your story maps while looking at “My Content” in ArcGIS Online, but “My Stories” allows you to see all of your story maps listed at once.  My Stories also contains tools for you to check any broken links or any other problems with the click of a mouse. Note that the ArcGIS Online assistant and the Geo-Jobe assistant tech support is available through the organizations that create these tools, not Esri. What useful practices would YOU add to this list? 5 Practices that Make Life Easier in ArcGIS Online ... View more

ArcGIS Online is an easy-to-use cloud-based Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) Geographic Information System.  I have found that the following five practices have made my work in ArcGIS Online a bit easier, and I trust they will do so for you and your students, as well.  I named them practices to encourage you to practice using them.  If you do, I think that you--and your students--will have a better experience in using these tools, data sets, and maps that are now literally at your fingertips. 1. Use folders.  As I explain in this video, using folders is an excellent way for you to keep your projects organized in ArcGIS Online.  Don't place everything in the "root" folder.  Make it a habit to store the results of your analysis, which are stored as map layers, in a folder that you have created for one single project.  Periodically go through your folders and delete maps, services, and layers that you no longer need.  Along these lines, be a good digital citizen and clean up after yourself, by unsharing anything that does not need to be shared, with the general public, and organization, or a group. 2.  Take a few seconds to name your data layers descriptively so that you can find them in the future.  This is particularly important when you are running the analysis tools and making many layers in the process.  For example, I include the value of my buffer in my proximity layers, such as "Buffer of Broad Street Well 500 meters".  And don't neglect populating your metadata with description and tags.  Spending a little time with these practices will save you hours in the future in finding your data quickly.  You will also help others to find your data if you are sharing, and thus encourage the use of your resources and foster collaboration. 3.  To transfer content between folders in your own ArcGIS Online organizational account, and between ArcGIS Online organizational accounts, or in Portal, use the ArcGIS Online Assistant.  It also allows you to view the underlying JSON for any item in ArcGIS Online or your Portal, and you can modify the URLs for services in web maps and registered applications. 4.  To more effectively manage your ArcGIS Online organizational account, use the Geo-Jobe tools.  The folks at Geo-Jobe offer severe educational discounts, as well.  You can copy groups, add multiple users, change permissions, view item dependencies, and do so much more, with these tools. 5.  Use the "My Stories" zone to manage your story maps. Yes, you can see your story maps while looking at "My Content" in ArcGIS Online, but "My Stories" allows you to see all of your story maps listed at once.  My Stories also contains tools for you to check any broken links or any other problems with the click of a mouse. Note that the ArcGIS Online assistant and the Geo-Jobe assistant tech support is available through the organizations that create these tools, not Esri. What useful practices would YOU add to this list? 5 Practices that Make Life Easier in ArcGIS Online ... View more

Once again we are collaborating with the editor of Transactions in GIS, to produce a special issue and related presentation sessions at the 2017 Esri User Conference.   We welcome novel GI Science research of all types.   See the Call for Papers details here goo.gl/YajhIU ... View more

Greetings Everyone:   I normally don’t like to post about competitions to this list but this one is so focused on telling stories through maps that I thought you might wish to tell your students or your favorite educator about it.   #The International Year of Global Understanding Story Maps Competition:   http://go.esri.com/IYGU-Competition   Joseph Kerski ... View more

Not long ago, I described the Landsat Thematic Bands Web Mapping Application, an easy-to-use but powerful teaching and research tool. It is a web mapping application with global coverage, with mapping services updated daily with new Landsat 8 scenes and access to selected bands that allows the user to visualize agriculture, rock formations, vegetation health, and more.  The Time tool allows for the examination of changes over years, over seasons, or before and after an event.  The Identify tool gives a spectral profile about each scene.  I have used this application dozens of times over the past year in remote sensing, geography, GIS, and other courses and workshops, and judging from the thousands of views that this blog has had, many others have done the same thing. If that weren't all, our Esri development team has recently made the tool even better--one can now save a time sequence or a band combination as a permanent URL that can be shared with others.  The flooding of 20 districts in August and September 2016 in Uttar Pradesh, India, for example, can be easily seen on this link that uses the application, with screenshots below. Another example is the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire in Alberta, Canada  - the user can change the time to see the region's vegetation cover before and after fire, and the extent of the smoke during the fire.  Or, you can analyze a different band combination, as is seen here. To do this, open the application.  Note that this application's URL has been updated over the one I referred to last year.  Move to an area of interest.  Select any one of the available thematic band renderers (such as agriculture, natural color, color infrared, and so on), or create your own band combination using build.  Then, turn on "time" to see your area of interest at different periods using your band combination.  Next, share this image with other people.   Simply click on any one of the social platforms (Facebook or Twitter) in the upper right, which will create a short link that can be shared.  When the person you send this link to opens it, the Landsat app will open in exactly the same state it was in before social platform tool was clicked.  This makes it a very convenient teaching, presentation, and research tool.  Give it a try! Landsat 8 Image for Allahabad India on 31 May 2016. Landsat 8 Image for Allahabad India showing flooding on 19 August 2016. ... View more

In response to inquiries that educators and others have had recently, I created several videos explaining how to georeference a map and serve it in ArcGIS Online, beginning here and continuing here and here.  Georeferencing is the process of aligning spatial data in map form has no spatial information explicitly attached to it, usually because it has been scanned from film, paper, or another medium, and attaching spatial information to it.  By "spatial information" we mean a real-world map projection and coordinate system.  The process of georeferencing is powerful because it allows you to add historical or other documents to your GIS project, so that you can work with them just like you can with your other GIS maps and data.  You match your scanned aerial photo, map, or other document by creating a series of control points, which I explain here.  I did this using ArcGIS Desktop (ArcMap); soon you will be able to do this in ArcGIS Pro, and, I hope, someday in ArcGIS Online. Georeferencing has been around for as long as GIS has existed--since the 1960s.  But more recently, with the advent of cloud based GIS platforms such as ArcGIS Online, you can now serve your newly georeferenced data to the cloud, as I demonstrate in the third video in the series.  Serving it in ArcGIS Online enables you to use it anywhere, on any device, at any time.  Then, if you share your data in ArcGIS Online, others can use it as well in their own maps and projects. Let's say you have georeferenced and uploaded a historical map, as I do in these videos with one of the wonderful historical Sanborn fire insurance maps, and now have published it to ArcGIS Online.  Now you want to create a Swipe story map web mapping application so that you can compare how a city changed over time.  I explain how to to do that in this video.  As with any GIS-based project, being organized about your work is crucial, and in this video I demonstrate how to effectively use folders in ArcGIS Online to support your organized work. I hope these resources will be valuable to the community and I look forward to hearing your comments and how you have used georeferencing in your own work. Georeferencing a historical map in ArcGIS. ... View more

My new videos - the Lakota Language Story Map:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_U-YGKGYyA And how to add sound to story map captions:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkLc6IfYhZA  ... View more

To meet the needs of a growing number of educators interested in using Esri Story Maps in teaching and research, I invite you to join a new Story Maps for Education group in the GeoNet Community. This will be our virtual place to connect, share and collaborate on topics related to “story maps in education." Story Maps are multimedia web mapping applications that join audio, narrative, video, photographs, and thematic and base map in a compelling environment that is perfect for communicating the results of any investigation from local to global in scale.  GeoNet is where GIS users from a wide variety of disciplines can collaborate, share, and discover information through blogs, updates, videos, discussions, and more. The Story Maps for Education group is a "members only" group, which means all content is public but, in order to contribute to the conversations and be alerted of new content, you need to click “Actions” and then “join group” in the top right. Quick tips: If you do have a GeoNet account and are not logged in to GeoNet, you’ll need to click "login" first to log in to GeoNet, go to the URL above, then Actions - > join the group. If you don’t have a GeoNet account, click “login” and then follow the steps to create your GeoNet account. Once your account is created you can use the group link in this email or search for the “Story Maps for Education” group in the community. For any additional questions, general tips and guidelines, please visit the GeoNet Community Help group. Thanks for joining and we look forward to seeing you in the GeoNet Community! Story Maps for Education Group in GeoNet. ... View more