A recent NPR story was shared with me by a Skidmore College Geologist, Dr. Amy Frappier. The article makes a link between ancient seas and plankton to modern presidential voting patterns, telling the story of how the land’s ancient sea led to fertile soil, to cotton production and plantations, to current voting patterns. What a great example of using data to understand spatial relationships and patterns, linking geology to political science. Nice work, NPR. Yet another example of how interdisciplinary GIS is, and how GIS allows us to understand our world through analyzing patterns and relationships in the physical and human world.
See link to the entire story here.
1 comment
The Geography of the Creative Thinking | on location says:
Jan 10, 2013
[...] This is a story told through maps that is inspired by some interesting patterns in presidential voting patterns. I really like that the pattern can be seen in different types of unrelated maps going back through time, all the way to an unlikely source. I think this example can show the power of maps to explain patterns, and it shows that using the visual elements in real data can help us have greater understanding of otherwise unexplainable geographic patterns. Enjoy this trip through the geography of the SouthEast United States. View my post and the link to the NPR story here. [...]