Mapping to Visualize Inequality
Dr. Andrew Taylor, a professor of Political Science in the School of Public and International Affairs at NC State University, is writing a book provisionally titled, "Our Equitable Democracy: American Politics and Economic Outcomes in an Age of Inequality." He contacted Data & Visualization Librarian Jeff Essic in May 2019 for assistance creating 16 maps, which will illustrate the effects of income inequality in politics.
Overview
Dr. Taylor compiled his data into a spreadsheet with values for each US congressional district for the 98th (1983-1985), 103rd (1993-1995), 108th (2003-2005), and 113th (2013-2015) Congress. The values represented (1) Gini coefficient by household, (2) the household median income, (3) the proportion of households in the highest income cohort, and (4) the proportion of households in the lowest income cohort. The highest and lowest income cohorts vary across decades and are defined by Census data.
Dr. Taylor needed to create US Congressional district maps for each Congress showing the data within five breakout classes for each of the four data categories. One challenge was that Alaska and Hawaii needed to be shown adjacent to the Continental US map in a way that was not facilitated by the available Congressional District GIS data. Also, the final maps needed to be exported as high resolution grayscale for publication.
