A cool mapping project from Joseph Kerski who’s always full of fun educational ideas! No doubt he mapped Loveland, Colorado in this one! Thanks Joseph
From the Esri EDU Blog…
An easy yet powerful activity is to map place names using a GIS. Make it even better by mapping names associated with holidays. For Valentine’s Day, I mapped place names containing the words “love”, “heart”, and “rose." I ran three queries against the Geographic Names Information System, exporting each file as a comma separated value (CSV) file.
I brought each file into Excel, deleted a few fields I did not need, re-saved, and brought the file into ArcGIS Explorer using Add Content.
Rose was the most popular (the 591 red circles), then love (the 136 yellow notes), and heart (the 38 blue circles). Candy and chocolate resulted in only 6 and 3 places, respectively.
There seems to be a clustering of “Rose” place names in Minnesota, the southern Mississippi Valley, and along the Delaware River.
See Where Can Love Be Found? Mapping Valentine’s Day with GIS