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.