CHall Historical Analysis through GIS

     For this map I downloaded two county level datasets from NHGIS and joined them with this historical county shape file for the year 1950. Two of the datasets I thought would make for an interesting map and analysis were the live birth rates by race and the age census of people twenty-one and up. I'm not sure if I fully thought this through when I chose these. I was hoping I would be able to see a correlation between birth rates, race, and age, but I realized that these two datasets weren't quite what I needed to be able to make a reasonable hypothesis on that topic. So I chose to only show the live birth rates, which still didn't display as much information as I had hoped. During this process I did realize just how important it is to normalize the field for comparison, before normalizing the data it appeared that there were almost no "White" live births in all of South Carolina...this obviously didn't make sense.        Fg. 1 Non-White Live Births ...

       The goal of this map was to show a comparison of historical railroad data with a birthplace census from 1880 in the United States. I was specifically interested in the Central Pacific Railroad and the census records for people who's birthplace was listed as China. In the mid 1900's the United States was dealing with a shortage of labor and then began hiring many individuals from China to help complete the railroads. In the map shown below I selected a field that represented people born in China and normalized the data by population. As you can see the map does show that almost all the people in the United States that were born in China are located on the west coast surrounding the area of the Central Pacific Railroad. By choosing China as the birthplace to be shown on the map it made the map fairly easy to interpret due to restricted area that this population is located. Though I believe being able to include a legend would very beneficial in the interpretatio...

  My map depicts two layers that represent the comparison of the HOLC redlining districts of neighborhood grades and 2010 census specifically showing the ratio of African American home owners in Columbia, SC. Grade A, B, C, and D are represented by the colors green, blue, yellow, pink. These grades were assigned by the HOLC between 1935-1940 to give quantitative data representing mortgage security of these areas, ranging from grade A being “good” to D being “hazardous”. The 2010 census layer is shown in the variation of blues, darker blue representing higher numbers of African American owned homes. By using these two layers we can compare assigned mortgage security areas to African American owned homes. It appears according to this map that higher rated neighborhoods have a lower percentage of African American owned homes. This map helps to show that HOLC determines grades not just by socioeconomic factors but also heavily on racial demographic. One of the limitations of this map i...