Now that the project is over, it’s time to show it off! Over the past few weeks, the Ramonat Scholars have been working with Google Fusion Tables. Fusion Tables is a tool that allows you to project data points over a map. You can then manipulate the data by variable. In our case, we used data collected by Tracy Leavelle and John Corrigan for their project French and Spanish Missions in North America.
Students downloaded the spreadsheets with Leavelle and Corrigan’s data, then input it to a Google spreadsheet. We ran into a couple of bumps in the data input process, but everyone learned how important it is to have uniformity when you’re contributing data to a group project like this.
Then, students uploaded that Google spreadsheet into Fusion Tables and played around with the map. They could manipulate it by variables including: empire (French or Spanish), date established, date closed, years open, major commodity, and associated Native American tribe. By manipulating the map, they drew some fascinating conclusions about the missions.
Check out our map here, and click on the “Map of Latitude” tab to see missions color-coded by duration.