GeoCommons Testing, Race Distributions in Washington DC, and Social Justice

We’ve been working hard over the last couple of weeks testing GeoCommons and getting data moved into it. I was testing some data over Martin Luther King Day and thought I’d take a look at some racial data at the tract level from the 2000 Census. I loaded up data for the District of Columbia for Caucasian, African American, and Hispanic population then generated heat maps for all three to see where there was the highest geographic concentration of each race. The results where amazingly stark:

The Location and Concentration of African American Population in Washington DC

The Location and Concentration of Caucasian Population in Washington DC

The Location and Concentration of Hispanic Population in Washington DC

Back at George Mason University we did a fair amount of research on social justice issues like digital divide and environmental hazards. When you have the ability to overlay data sets like high speed internet access, hazardous material dumping grounds, home loan approvals, and then overlay and correlate race and income data there are interesting opportunities to raise awareness on lots of public issues. All part of the importance we see in providing geospatial data and easy analysis tool to the mass public. We are working on the ability to be able to run spatial correlations as well, which will add some hard numbers to the heat maps and thematic maps. So, if you wanted to see if there was a higher correlation between the location of hazardous waste site and one race or income level and another you would get a map and statistic for that relationship. For instance Wal-Mart locations in Houston might have 60% correlation with incomes $20-40k population, 35% correlation for $40-60k, and a correlation of 10% with incomes over 100k. There are applications of these tools to site location, target marketing, demographic analysis and social justice issues – dual use is what we are all about.