Mark's Spatial History Baby Steps

Given that I have been traveling for most of the time that has transpired since the last blog post (and thus unable to use ArcGIS), sharing a project update today seems a bit premature.  That being said, I know we have just three weeks left between now and the final paper submission, so I suppose it's now or never! Update on planned maps Sam, Lelia, and I were able to spend some time with the dataset last Monday and realized that it was counting some of the events in the USC Reconstruction alumni lives as alumni (i.e., their birth dates and dates of passing were coding to their identity codes), so Dr. Kennedy graciously spent some time over the holiday fixing that issue for us.  (We heard from Lelia today that she was able to manipulate the data as we had hoped, so there is good progress!)  Given the length of time remaining the course, I did realize that creating "snapshots" of the locations of the alumni at various intervals in the late 19th c. (i.e., where were they al...

For the final project, I'm delighted to be working with Sam and Lelia on a project initiated by Dr. Tom Brown of the history department to understand the life trajectories of the USC students from 1873-1877,  the Reconstruction years during which African American students first attended the school.  Dr. Kennedy has been advising Dr. Brown on how spatial analysis could enhance this project, and undergraduates in Dr. Brown's undergraduate history course have been undertaking most of the data wrangling.   Sources and datasets The primary "dataset," which is itself a compilation of a variety of data from many sources, has been a blog created by an emeritus math professor who has been meticulously culling data on these students to publish short biographies of them on his blog, Blind Man with a Math Degree . The blog has published some 80 biographies of undergraduates during these years (click on the tab RadicalStudent to see them), drawing upon multiple data sources like ...

Once again, I feel like I am starting over with a whole new set of learning in this class, which is a great thing (however daunting it may be!).  In returning to the hurricane and tornado data, I realized, first and foremost, that my naming of my various map layers left a lot to be desired, and I had to spend more time that one would like with various layers' attribute tables to figure out what various layers were in fact representing.  Despite that annoyance (a lesson learned, really), I decided to try to figure out if the "mean center" of the tornado lines that we had created a few weeks ago changed over the decades.  The idea for this approach came from seeing some of my classmates' blogs that suggested both a westward shift in tornadoes over the years as well as a counter-argument that tornadoes' locations were not shifting significantly. To create such maps, I undertook a few steps: 1) I used definition queries to create lines that represented the tornado lin...