This Google Fusion Tables Map is inspired by President Obama’s State of the Union address where he backs natural gas fracking [1, 2] and Andy Arthur‘s map. I’ve placed the locations of natural gas wells over a map of property values in Pennsylvania (the full map can be found here).

I lived in Broome County, NY (another Marcellus Shale area) for 7 years before moving to PA. Just as I was leaving, the “fracking” debate was heating up. It’s an interesting debate, because it positions jobs and economic development against environment and health. Marcellus Shale gas sits underneath some of the poorest areas of the Northeast – places decimated by de-industrialization, as well as the decline or re-location of major companies/employers. So it’s not surprising that politicians, gas companies, and many citizens are eager to open up more wells in the hope that jobs and resources “come back.”

However, many are afraid of the environmental and heath problems that may come out this (and rightfully so). Fracking involves the pumping of large volumes of water and chemicals into the ground. This has consequences not only in terms of environmental contamination and public health. As Scientific American points out, the risk of drinking water contamination increases as more wells are fracked (and even more so when they are near one another). This is why Obama has suggested that companies release the full list of chemicals used in the process if they are to continue opening up wells. However, knowing about the hazards does not mean that people won’t be exposed to them if or when contamination happens.

As a sociologist, I’d like to point out something that’s frequently missing from this debate – inequality and power. Many of the areas where fracking has happened or will soon take place are not only the poorest areas of the state, but they are also areas with existing superfund sites and high rates health problems such as cancer. Does this region really need more toxic waste? Is a case of the poor and under-represented carrying the burden for our nation’s thirst for energy?

Additional Sources:

• Department of Energy Hydaulic Fracturing Report
• Google Fusion Tables Layer Builder
• PA DEP Oil & Gas
• State Cancer Profiles
• U.S. Census Fact Finder

Above is a map of Pennsylvania median property values (2000) by zip code created with Google Fusion Tables.

Google Fusion Tables is a great tool, but it can be 1) a bit intimidating 2) difficult to use without knowing how to get shape files.

While problem #1 can be solved with practice and playing around, problem #2 is a bit more complicated. While the U.S. Census Bureau and other organizations have shape (.SHP) files for free, you need a bit of work to make it useable in Google Fusion Tables. Shape to Fusion is a great site for doing this. After it converts the file and uploads it for you, all you need to do is merge the new table with your data.

For more help, here is a helpful guide for converting SHP files into something Google Fusion Tables can display.

Here’s the same map with county boundaries.

Additional links:

• U.S. Census Fact Finder
• Fusion Tables Layer Builder

Google Fusion Tables is a useful (free) tool for visualizing data. You can create maps, scatter, bar, and pie charts using one or more data tables. Perhaps the best feature is the custom map function. Above is a map of cancer incidence rates from the CDC for Delaware, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania.

Here is an additional map adding superfund sites to the above map.

Useful links:

• CDC State Cancer Profiles
  
• Census Quick Facts
• Google Fusion Tables Map Resources

This set is largely inspired the the infographics from Mother Jones illustrating the growing inequality gap in the United States. Infographics have become incredibly popular over the past few years. There are also a number of great tools for making them. However, infographics don’t readily translate over to PowerPoint. This is why I decided to make a presentation that visualizes economic inequality and is easily editable (for things like new data and other updates).

These charts are made mostly using data from the following websites:

• ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/lf/aat24.txt
• http://www.bls.gov/cps/tables.htm#empstat
• http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/int-comp-small-business/
• http://www.census.gov/

Timelines are useful tools for social scientists or anyone interested in history or how things in the past are interrelated. While there are a lot of free timeline tools online (e.g. CHNM, SIMILE), I wanted something I could easily cut & paste into documents and presentations.

This is an Excel based timeline that covers the lifetimes of various sociologists (based on the timelines found on Vertex42). It also includes some of their major works and a few major historical events. Since this is done in Excel, you can copy and paste it into Power Point very easily.

You can download the excel file and edit it as you like.

NOTE: Excel has a long standing problem with dates prior to 1900. My solution was to basically drop the first 2 digits of the year on the X axis, since they aren’t absolutely necessary in this timeline.