Final Project Progress…

My idea for this project has changed considerably. As I said before, my idea about roadside attractions and the rise of the American family road trip was of far too wide a scope for this project. Instead, I will be using a GIS map that I created for Dr. Petrik (with her permission), which illustrates certain types of employment and levels of disposable income around the country.

Dr. Petrik needed the map for to demonstrate the lasting effects of the Panic of 1893 on the Midwest. My interpretation of the map differs a bit from Dr. Petrik’s in that I am using it to imagine what other types of questions that can be asked or what assumptions can be made from the map. In making this map, I pulled up a list of Apple Stores and Williams-Sonoma Stores, placing points on the map for each store location. I also placed points on the map to represent each location of a General Motors subcontractor and each location of Defense Contracting companies. In locating the Defense Contracting companies, I pulled every fifth company from a list of every contracting company. The stores that I located on the map represent disposable income and the contractors that I located represent major sources of employment.  In addition to this map, I found a map from the NY Times, Geography of a Recession, illustrating unemployment rates across the country. This map is an excellent preliminary example of the ways in which cartography and GIS can be used in the description and interpretation of history and current culture. It is an interactive map that shows unemployment rates across the country with a color scale, and features pop-ups that show the unemployment rates of individual counties as the user hovers their cursor over the counties.

In looking at the two maps, it first becomes apparent that there are corresponding patterns between the two in the area of the Midwest. The empty area in my map corresponds with an area that has the lowest unemployment rates in the country. The fact that there is no representation of the type of disposable income that I mapped in this area, which comprises Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska, and that there is very little representation of the employers that I mapped, coupled with relatively extreme rates of unemployment, suggests to me that the economic patterns or habits in this area are different from the rest of the country. These are areas that are well known for their agriculture production. When I look at the two maps, I imagine an economic system that is inclusive locally and exclusive nationally; characteristic of a system that we, who are trapped within the global capitalist discourse, might describe as traditional. It seems that the areas that I am discussing here must have avoided the incursion of national trends and disaster by maintaining a local community. I imagine that there are probably many more community stores than have been able to survive in the rest of the country. It seems that the people that live in these areas must spend their money at stores like this, that we would call “Mom and Pop Stores,” and that possibly these stores obtain the goods that they sell from within the community. Through this system, money almost wholly circulates locally, keeping profits within the community.

I will have more about this tomorrow night, along with the maps…

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