Federal

Smithsonian Story Map – Tradition & Art of Living China

The second in a series of story maps for the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Tradition and the Art of Living China highlights the culture bearers appearing at the 2014 Folklife Festival in Washington D.C. Built by Blue Raster and Cricket Media, the map allows users to experience the artistry and heritage of those keeping China’s diverse traditions alive.

Tradition and the Art of Living China Story Map built by Blue Raster

Although the map has since been removed from the web, it was created using ArcGIS Online. The story map integrates photographs of the Folklife Festival participants and their work. As a result, it offers a comprehensive look into the cultural heritage of China. From calligraphy and pottery, to martial arts, users worldwide can explore the unique stories of these tradition bearers.

Tradition and Art of Living China

Smithsonian’s Virtual Field Trip around the Globe‏

The Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and Cricket Media, an education media company and global learning network, recently invited kids from around the world to identify and interview people who exemplify important traditions in their communities, then asked them to document and present their stories.

Traditions-of-World-640

Cricket Media and Blue Raster created the Traditions of the World story map using ArcGIS Online, highlighting the top video submissions from kids ages 8-18 from around the world.  The result is an interactive virtual field trip with lively hosts that include a 9 year old boy from West Bengal India showing traditional saris being hand woven and students in China documenting everything from dumpling making to martial arts.

The challenge was launched in coordination with the Smithsonian Center’s annual June-July Washington D.C.-based Folklife Festival and extends the folklife experience to millions of students globally. The Story Map has since been removed from the web.

“The challenge inspired students to explore the richness of their local traditions and unique stories of tradition bearers, and the map created by Blue Raster captured this amazing student work in an engaging way that will preserve these traditions for generations to come,” said Cricket Media CEO, Katya Andresen.  “It’s a truly unique, global digital museum, curated by kids.”

Traditions of Calligraphy with Ruochen

REL EdMaps Helps Analyze School Data in the Midwest

How has poverty changed in the Midwest region since 2000? This question as well as others related to education priorities in the Midwest can be answered with the REL Midwest’s newly launched EdMaps.

EdMaps is a mapping application that displays educational data as “story maps” with the focus of building knowledge across the REL’s four educational priority areas. Built by Blue Raster, EdMaps helps users analyze publicly available school- and district-level data, observe trends over time and frame conversations on practice and policy.

REL Midwest EdMaps

In its initial debut, EdMaps includes story maps on graduation rates and poverty levels and future releases of the application will allow a choice of data to overlay and compare over time.

Matt Burke, project leader, says:

We believe that education stakeholders throughout our region will benefit greatly from being able to identify and compare particular schools, districts, and states, observe trends over time and demographic shifts, and create custom data displays from a wide variety of publicly available data. We hope that EdMaps will serve as a useful tool to help frame conversations on practice and policy, and the development of this tool would not have been possible without the knowledgeable and skillful staff at Blue Raster.

The data is delivered by ArcGIS for Server deployed in the Amazon Cloud and uses the ArcGIS API for JavaScript. School District data trends are leveraging with the Dojo Toolkit and HighCharts API.

To view the application, visit http://www.relmidwest.org/edmaps.

Famine Early Warning Systems Network New Website

How does USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development) prepare for famine assistance to the world’s neediest? One success story is the Famine Early Warning Systems Network at www.fews.net.

Blue Raster assisted in releasing the new FEWS NET and is proud to partner with Chemonics International and Forum One in launching the new tool. Blue Raster automated the generation of forecasting maps for the 37 monitored countries, making the maps available sooner to decision makers. Two side-by-side comparative maps of food-security outlooks are produced for every region, and the countries are colored according to their food security, highlighting areas of Stress, Crisis, Emergency and Famine.

FEWS NET

FEWS NET is a collaboration of international, regional and national partners to provide timely and rigorous early-warning and vulnerability information on emerging and evolving food security issues. Once identified, FEWS NET uses a suite of communications and decision-support products to help decision makers act to mitigate food insecurity.

The tech behind the site are ArcGIS Desktop and Python Tools as well as ArcGIS Server delivering dynamic maps.  Node.js delivers both dynamic and static maps as needed throughout the Drupal CMS, with tight integration allowing Drupal admins to access maps for report pages during periodic updates. The servers are hosted in the Amazon Cloud environment taking advantage of S3 as well.

National School Boundaries – Attendance Area Maps

Beginning in November 2013, school districts across the United States will be able to draw, upload, or update previous year school boundaries in a web-editing application as part of the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).

Blue Raster developed NCES’s online feature-drawing and editing application using Esri’s ArcGIS for Server and JavaScript API. One of the biggest challenges was offering a customized editing toolset for the non-technical district representatives who best know their school attendance areas.

School Attendance Boundary Survey 2013-2014 School Year

Once processed, the school boundaries will be freely available for visualization and download on the NCES School District Demographics System website.  By providing the public with detailed boundary information, it will be possible for the public, researchers, and policy makers to examine relationships between schools covering many demographic, social and economic indices.

NCES has initiated this 2013 School Attendance Boundary Survey (SABS) with support from the U.S Census Bureau, to collect school boundaries for the 13,000+ U.S. school districts. This represents more than 100,000 public elementary and secondary schools from the Common Core of Data (CCD) school universe.

Blue Raster has delivered innovative data-visualization techniques for NCES using the latest Esri ArcGIS-for-Server technologies, ArcGIS Online offerings, Python and many JavaScript tools such as data-driven documents (d3.js) .


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