Week 2 - Lab 2A

View Presidential Birthplaces and Bases of Political Power in a larger map

KEY (colors identify political party platform of the elected president):

Yellow = Federalist

Green = Democratic-Republican

Blue = Democratic

Red = Republican

The above map depicts the birthplaces of the 44 presidents of the United States of America. Google Maps, a pre-existing mapping toolkit, was used to demarcate the 44 locations unto a reference system. By plotting the points, a visual schemata is provided to give an idea of where births are concentrated and where births are absent. The majority of the land west of the Mississippi River has not been graced with a presidential birth. Of the 44 presidents, only 8 have been born in this western region. Nevertheless, the birthplace of presidents follows a general trend of shifting Westward. This is probably due to the expansion of US territory after the colonial period. The state that has housed the most presidential births is Virginia, with 8 births, followed closely behind by Ohio, with 7 births. An interesting coincidence is that of the 7 presidents born in Ohio, all of them were elected on the Republican party platform.

Although a definitive correlation between the bases of political power and the birthplace of presidents cannot be confirmed, it is interesting to see how births have clustered in the past, and in more recent years, have dispersed. Presidential births are concentrated along the Eastern Seaboard, more specifically in the very Northeast and near Virginia. But could a shift toward the West signify a change in the political base of power? Washington D.C remains as the nation's capital, but a rising tide of political strength in the West has begun to produce shifting dynamics in the political geography of the country. With the complete decline of the old manufacturing sectors in the rust belt and the emergence of new industries, such as bio-tech and green enterprise, the above map may look very different with the progress of the 21st Century. Speculations aside, Google Maps provide an easy way to create original and personal drafts.

With the advent of Web 2.0, neogeography has burgeoned throughout the Internet. This offers ordinary people the opportunity to creatively express their interests and opinions in a spatial format. Furthermore, because neogeography is interactive, it allows for collaborative efforts in producing maps. And therein lies both the extraordinary potential for innovation and the pitfall for disseminating false or misleading information. In my experience with Google Maps, I found that the absence of guidelines was both a help and a hindrance to me. It helped me by allowing me to map out a topic as obscure as presidential births and to organize it in any way I saw fit. (I could have organized it by year, name, political party, or any host of categories.) But at the same time, it was a hindrance because it did not require accuracy from me. I could plot the points anywhere and people could take the information at face value. Google Maps has a simple and easy-to-use interface which allows for basic map making, but I found it a bit more difficult for a first-time user to go beyond that.

Week 1 - Lab 1B

1. The name of the quadrangle is Beverly Hills.

2. The adjacent quadrangles are Canoga Park, Van Nuys, Burbank, Topanga, Hollywood, Venice, and Inglewood.

3. This quadrangle was first created in 1995.

4. The datum used to create this map are the North American Datum of 1927 and the North American Datum of 1983.

5. The scale of the map is 1:24,000.

6.
a) 5 cm on the map is equivalent to 1,200 m on the ground
b) 5 in on the map is equivalent to 1.894 mi on the ground
c) 1 mi on the ground is equivalent to 2.64 in on the map
d) 3 km on the ground is equivalent to 12.5 cm on the map

7. The contour interval on the map is 20 ft.

8.
a) Public Affairs Building, UCLA
Latitude: 34° 4’ 26’’ N (or 34.07388° N)
Longitude: 118° 26’ 21’’ W (or 118.4392° W)

b) Tip of Santa Monica Pier
Latitude: 34° 0’ 27’’ N (or 34.00761° N)
Longitude: 118° 29’ 59’’ W (or 118.49959° W)

c) Upper Franklin Canyon Reservoir
Latitude: 34° 7’ 12’’ N (or 34.11962° N)
Longitude: 118° 24’ 37’’ W (or 118.41056° W)

9.
a) Greystone Mansion (in Greystone Park)
560 feet (or 170.688 meters)

b) Woodlawn Cemetery
140 feet (or 42.672 meters)

c) Crestwood Hills Park
700 feet (or 213.36 meters)

10. The UTM zone of this map is 11.

11. The UTM coordinates for the lower left corner of your map are 362000m E and 3763000m N.

12. 1,000,000 square meters are within each cell.

13.

14. The Magnetic Declination of this map is 14 degrees East.

15. North to South

16.

Week 1 - Lab 1A

(1) "The World from the Best Authorities"





(URL: http://stock-images.antiqueprints.com/images/sm0004-WorldKitchin1777.jpg)


Thomas Kitchin engraved unto a copper plate this image of the world, which was then published in Guthrie's New Geographical Grammar, circa 1770. Ink was applied to the engraved image, which was then pressed unto parchment, and later colored in. The map depicts the Western and Eastern Hemispheres of the world and separates them into conjoined, yet distinct, entities. In including latitudinal and longitudinal references, the map is defining absolute locations, in which a reference system is used to locate places. Thus, the explicit purpose of this map is to present a realistic representation of the world, yet it contains subtle details that hint of political refrains. For instance, there are portions of the map that are not included. The Northwest territory of North America, a portion of present-day Australia, as well as all of Antarctica are omitted, suggesting that these areas did not fall under British hegemony. It is important to note that the center of the map is deliberately not England, which is depicted as a small island nation. William Guthrie, an emerging figure from the Scottish Enlightenment, questioned the Anglo-centric perspective that dominated the worldview of the 17th and 18th Centuries. By providing a map aimed at accurately portraying the world, Guthrie challenged the notion of British supremacy. His map is entitled "The World from the Best Authorities", which explicitly challenges British authority.




(2) "World Mapper Project: Net Immigration"





(URL: http://blog.craigkapp.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/17.png)


The University of Sheffield, which is located in the United Kingdom, created graphic distortions of a regular map to highlight different characteristics of the world's nations. In the above map, relative differences in net immigration are shown. The larger the shape of the country, the larger the relative figure of net immigration that nation has. Countries that are not even displayed on the map, such as a few South American countries, have a net emigration, or more people are leaving the country than entering it. Net migration is measured as the total number of people entering the country subtracted by the total number of people leaving the country. From the map, it can be discerned that the United States, Western Europe, and the Middle East have the largest figures of net immigration. A possible correlation that can be drawn from this map is that richer areas seem to have larger figures of net immigration. The reason for such a trend may be that places that are more affluent generate pull factors that draw people from less affluent places.




(3) "Crime Topography of San Francisco"





(URL: http://strangemaps.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/right_500_2.jpg)


These maps were produced by Douglas McCune, who used data collected on crime in the city proper of San Francisco. The city was divided into grids of the same area. Looking at eight different forms of lawbreaking, McCune used records of their spatial location and the number of those criminal offenses to create a unique topographic view of San Francisco. What is being shown is not the famous hills of SF, but rather the levels of different crimes. The higher the peak, the greater the level of crime in that particular area. Some crimes are more widespread, while others are much more concentrated in specific areas. For example, vehicle theft and larceny encompass the entire city, whereas prostitution occurs mainly in the Tenderloin District. These maps are useful in strategically targeting certain crimes as well as knowing where to place scarce police resources to prevent the most amount of crime.