Rachael Lanning: Spatial History

  I am so glad I followed through and did not give up while making this! The instructions were obviously very long, and while not complicated, I really wanted to make sure I was making everything properly. I am honestly very proud of the outcome. I appreciated the explanations in the tutorial that said why exactly some changes to the map were being made, for instance, changing the scale of the y-axis on the chart to make it less misleading. There are definitely things in this tutorial that I will continue into my personal mapmaking in rest of the semester.

  Map showing dwellings, food/retail locations, vacant buildings, and other locations in the Gervais Street Vista district. Georeferenced Sanborn Fire Insurance Map of the desired location. I chose to look back at the Sanborn maps because I work with the maps in archaeology a lot, but usually after they have already been georeferenced and interpreted. For the most part, I have just used them to determine where good places to start digging shovel tests and test unites might be. I think it will be useful for my future in the field to know how to do the preliminary mapping. Mostly, I wanted to compare the Sanborn map with the area today. What I mostly noticed was the number of dwellings I was mapping. Even as I was in the process of adding them to the feature class, I realized that it was a clear majority. I find this interesting because in the Vista area today, it is mostly retail, shopping, and dining, and the only dwellings are multistory apartment buildings, much different than th...

 Average Hours Worked/Week/Laborer in Iron and Steel Manufacturing in 1880 as Compared to the 1880 Population https://data2.nhgis.org/main# (more information on the steel/iron workers) This map shows the average number of hours worked by individuals living in each county at iron and steel mills. I chose to leave the gradient as hours since that made the most sense in terms of visualizing the data. Notice that most of the counties are missing in this map.  I ran into some trouble with this data set because I did not realize that many of the values were null. I thought at first that some of the data was just not showing up, while in reality it was just too little to catch without changing the color scheme and assigning a color to the counties with null data. I tried doing as much research as possible in order to find the reason for why only these mills were included, I found the answer in NHGIS itself. Only steel manufacturing locations were asked about these topics. Possibly, o...

 England and Wales Birthplace as a Percentage of the U.S. 1880 Population & U.S. 1880s Railroads Ireland Birthplace as a Percentage of the U.S. 1880 Population & U.S. Major Rivers Based on these maps, a pattern emerges that shows a higher population of English and Welsh individuals settling near railroads, whereas the Irish population appears to be settling closer along the rivers.  In particular here, the Irish population is especially near the Hudson River, seem to be settling closer to the locations of the major rivers, you can also see a higher density where the Erie Canal is in Upstate NY. It is not on the map, but the location of the canal aligns exactly with a darker percentage of Irish born individuals. Alternatively, the English and Welsh born individuals align quite closely with the railroads in use in 1880. This is easily seen in the West, and on the Northern border. Notice how the highly English and Welsh populated area in the West is almost complimentary t...