Justine's GIS Blog

For my final project, I’m considering focusing on the Damron Guide and exploring how the visibility and number of LGBTQ (primarily gay male) establishments changed over time in relation to the legality of homosexuality across different U.S. states. Specifically, I want to examine whether there was an increase or decrease in listings for states where homosexuality remained illegal compared to those where it had been decriminalized. To do this, I plan to use Dr. Amanda Regan and Dr. Eric Gonzaba’s data from Mapping the Gay Guides alongside state-level legality data to track changes between 1960 and 1990. I intend to reach out to Dr. Regan to see if she’s able to share the dataset from their project; if not, I may attempt to reconstruct parts of it myself. In addition, I’m interested in incorporating data on lesbian bars and queer women’s spaces from the same period to create a more inclusive picture of LGBTQ geographies. ArcGIS has an interesting interactive feature on lesbian bars ...

For this week’s blog, I focused on the New York City dataset. I initially attempted to use the tornado dataset but ran into technical issues with the tools, so I decided to shift my focus. My goal was to examine population, race, parental birthplace (foreign or native born), and the two most common occupations, domestic servant and clerk, to identify potential patterns. I used the ArcGIS Online datasets for the 1880 and 1910 Manhattan Dwelling records. From my initial maps, it’s immediately clear that there was a dramatic population shift between 1880 and 1910. During this thirty-year period, New York City’s population doubled, driven largely by massive waves of immigration; a trend clearly reflected in the visualizations below. In 1880, the population was relatively sparse, with most residents concentrated around 123rd and 125th Streets. In the unweighted 1880 map, only three Black residents are shown living within the dwellings. When the data is weighted, the Black population becomes...