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.
