Welcome!

Welcome to my Maps and Geovisualizations blog!  This semester I will be sharing my work with you in this newly offered class.  I am very excited to begin, but before I do I would like to share some background information about myself and my experiences with mapping as well as my goals for this class.

I am a senior majoring in Leadership Studies and Geography as well as minoring in Sociology.  I am mostly interested, in general terms, in the relationship between people and places.  I am very interested in transportation, poverty, and opportunity in relation to geographic location.

Having taken the two previously offered spatial analysis/GIS classes at the University of Richmond, and having worked as an intern at the Spatial Analysis Lab for two years, I was excited about a new map-based course!  As a Geography major I have spent many classes and internships analyzing data and presenting my analysis in the form of maps.  However, my experience with different types of map-sharing and interactive software is relatively limited.  Simply put, I know how to do a lot of spatial analysis now, but I want to be able to make my results accessible and understandable to a larger audience (and make things look pretty)!

Since I am considering a career in urban planning, I think the tools we will use in this class will be helpful for my future. It is much easier to convince someone that a new trail, intersection plan, or building location is a good idea if your audience can visualize the result.  Having these tools in my skillset will enable me to communicate ideas with my peers, partners, and the public.

Even this semester these tools will come in handy.  As part of my role as a Spatial Analysis Lab Intern I am working with Dr. John Moeser through the Center for Civic Engagement in order to find ways to share his research on poverty, income levels, and unemployment in relation to race in the greater Richmond region.  In the past he has been working with maps that are stagnant and take quite a bit of time to compile.  Now, we are thinking of ways to make these maps interactive: showing changes over time, allowing viewers to select which layers they would like to show, and changing the scale of their viewing area.

While I love a good old traditional map, I understand that for some people this cartographical excitement may not be as strong.  I look forward to making maps and geovisualizations that excite a large audience and enable me to share large amounts of data in an easy to understand way. My goal for this semester is to apply our class experiences to my work with Dr. Moeser’s work on poverty and race in Richmond and find ways that will not only make his findings accessible but also make it easy to add to in the future.

I hope you will join me in finding new ways to display data and and making beautiful maps!