As part of GIS Day 2021, Bahare Sanaei-Movahed gave a presentation during DH Office Hours about an ongoing project using Survey 123 to aggregate data on housing prices in Boston. The project demonstrates the usefulness of Survey 123 for ArcGIS projects. Survey 123 is a form-centric data gathering resource that is a part of ESRI’s online suite for ArcGIS. Sanaei-Movahed began the talk with a more general discussion of ArcGIS Online and the sorts of projects that can be done using the software. She highlighted the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 Dashboard as an excellent example of the power of ESRI’s tools. This project is constantly updated, featuring live numbers of COVID-19 statistics all powered by ESRI. Sanaei-Movahed pointed interested members of the Northeastern community towards her GIS resources and tutorials, including information on accessing ArcGIS Online.
Following her brief overview of ESRI and ArcGIS Online, Sanaei-Movahed turned to her ongoing project focusing on housing prices in Boston. At the time of her talk, the project was still in its crowdsourcing phase of gathering data. To gather the data on housing prices, the project makes use of Survey 123. This survey can be found here for anyone who would like to contribute to the data.
Sanaei-Movahed discussed how in the early stages of the project the plan was to use Google Forms, but a comparison between Google Forms and Survey 123 revealed that Survey 123 was much better suited to the task at hand. Northeastern has the license to use Survey 123 in concert with ArcGIS Online, and Survey 123 is easily integrated into your ArcGIS Online account. All of the data gathered from the survey will automatically be populated into the relevant ArcGIS Online account. Although Survey 123 is embedded within ArcGIS Online (as well as the desktop version of ArcGIS), Sanaei-Movahed wanted to emphasize that ArcGIS Online can be used to create products without a geospatial component. All of the webpages for GIS Day 2021, including the poster competition that took place immediately before DH Office Hours, were created using ArcGIS Online StoryMap, demonstrating the non-spatial uses of ArcGIS Online. For any questions regarding ArcGIS and Survey 123, please contact Sanaei-Movahed.
