Final Project Proposal Presentation

For my final project, I plan on mapping something that is a little different from what the rest of the class will probably do. Since I am in a sorority I wanted to come up with a way that I could include my sorority in my final map project. Sororities have been growing largely in the last decade, and anywhere you go you can find prestigious, remarkable women who were once members of a sorority. For instance, 63% of all United States Cabinet members have been Greek. However, it is interesting that only 3% of the American population is part of a Greek organization.

This project is an opportunity to give a visualization of where and how many sorority chapters are from one region of the United States. Sororities around the country vary in size, so I wanted to focus only on the ten largest sororities according to number of chapters. There are twenty-six sororities total, with all different sizes, and honing in on the ten largest would be a good way to illustrate a snapshot of Greek life. Additionally, I would focus on the southern region of the United States where sororities are more popular than the rest of the country, in terms of size and number of chapters. The total number of states I will analyze will be fifteen and would include: Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. Generally, these are the states that are understood as being part of “the South.”

These are the maps I wanted to base my idea off of:

For the data set, I think it will make the most sense to use either a proportional symbol map or a dot density map. This is due to most of the sororities all being at the same universities and locations. Furthermore, I am going to include a breakdown of George Mason sororities and other schools that have an interesting range of sororities.

The audience this will be geared towards will be the class and later members of Greek life who are interested in the makeup of the top sororities in one region of the United States.

To access this data, I will have to go through the top ten sororities’ websites to locate the number of chapters for each of the fifteen states. The data on these sites is very accurate, because they continuously update their chapter numbers when a new chapter is installed. I’ve already done this and this is what the breakdown looks like. Additionally, the basemap for this project will include the outlined fifteen states of the southern region of the United States.

Since I have already done the data collection part of the process I already have my project underway. Next, I will be working on exactly how I will want to display this data on the basemap to make it look as visually appealing as possible. Challenges I perceive to occur include possibly changing the data set depending on how the map creation process unfolds.