ArcView Architecture, Data Sources and Gaps (Eigg Mountain Settlement History)

 

This mapping project for me was partly a learning exercise to see what it was possible to do with ArcView mapping as a research tool.  This section was going to be a detailed guide to the architecture of the existing project, an outline for anyone ambitious enough to construct a similar project or to take this one further, and a warning against making things too complex.

 

In the end I offer a simpler user’s guide to ArcReader, and discuss more of the mapping architecture as well as the difficulties of tracking changes over time in a document called Mapping Time.  One overly-complex element that got left by the wayside was a database in Microsoft Access.  Since ArcView layers can be databases, it is possible to link spatial locations with other Access databases containing rich information about and complex interrelations between people, places and times.  People were linked to one another genealogically, and also to parcels of land.  Since people move, buy, sell and inherit land the latter link was mediated by a table of date ranges specifying when the links were valid.  This architecture required more high quality data than we were able to collect.