Amos Wright
GIS
Assignment #7
The goal of this final project is to map the geographical distribution of places (cities and states) that are
the focus of articles in three US scholarly and professional planning journals. The purpose of the
mapping is to investigate geographic concentrations, distributions and gaps as part of a larger study of
place-based publication bias expounded within the paradigm of cultural competency.
After performing a meta-analysis of three peer-reviewed professional and scholarly planning journals
(approximately 350 issues), and coding for geographic locations I have generated a large tabular data set
in Excel that can be geocoded and then joined to shapefiles. A summary of the meta-data: columns for
“Journal Title,” “Article Title,” “Deep South Coding: Yes/No,” alternating columns for each city and state
referenced in an article, and a final column for keywords, which will be used in the final thesis project.
Necessary data layers include a national basemap with state boundaries and the locations of major
cities, as well as demographic data from the 2010 US Census; county polygons from the US Census and
Census designated places from M:\Country\USA\ESRIDataMap10\usa\census.
After extensive data management, a city-state address locator was created to geocode the tabular data
collected in the Excel worksheets for each meta-analyzed journal. After the worksheets were geocoded
with the customized address locator (which were tested to eliminate human error until all cities were
“matched”), they were joined to a geographic reference layer (spatial join to relate the data points to a
city point or state centroid points in each state polygon). This will also allow me to sum the number of
studies or articles per city or state. The summarize tool was used on the states data, which produced
one row per state and a count field representing the number of times each state was referenced in a
scholarly or professional planning journal. The summary table was subsequently joined to the states
geographic reference layer by the columns with state abbreviations.
Using graduated symbols and density surface raster tools, the final project will include approximately
the following five maps: national level city data map, national level state data map, and possibly
selected regional geography of the Deep South visualizing city data, selected regional geography of the
Deep South visualizing state data, selected regional geography of the West Coast visualizing city data,
selected regional geography of the of the West Coast visualizing state data, selected regional geography
of the East Coast visualizing city data, and selected regional geography of the East Coast visualizing state
data. Alaska and Hawaii are omitted from the mapping; international cities and locations were omitted
from the meta-analysis. The graduated symbols and raster density surface can be overlayed on 2010 US
Census demographic data by county to visualize how population density and other demographic
measures of diversity (income, race, education, etc.) are represented in scholarly and professional
planning literature.
Below is a screen capture illustrating the current state of the project with graduated symbols
representing state level data and red dots representing city level data.