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.

Although Spanish-Colonial Revival architecture and place-names dominates Southern California’s landscape, one also finds simulated Middle Eastern bazaars, references to Ancient Egypt, and the frequent use of iconography from the non-European Old World. While the region’s landscape is a product of bricolage and postmodern sensibilities, this article looks at the history of ‘Orientalism’ in Southern California’s built environment. In particular, I am looking at the precedents for this seemingly contradictory use of the ‘Oriental’ in the region. The ‘Oriental’ as a sinfully seductive means of creating spectacle in the built environment, is both glorified and demonized at the same time in popular discourse. For example, the ‘Oriental’ is celebrated in shopping malls, but demonized culturally and politically. However, it is in this contradiction, we can see how history and ideology has shaped the vernacular landscape. As such, this article will look at early twentieth century examples of the ‘Oriental’ in Spanish-Colonial Revival as a foundation to understand contradictions in the built environment, culture, and racial hierarchies.

In early twentieth century, Spanish-Colonial Revival became embedded in the local culture of Southern California. Through community celebrations, literature, film, and place names, images of the romantic Spanish past proliferated in mass media. However, perhaps most important of all was Spanish-Colonial Revival’s implementation in new homes. Both in the 1920s and since the 1980s, Spanish-Colonial Revival dominated the look of new suburban developments in Southern California. As such, red-tile, stucco, and palm trees are ubiquitous markers of not only development, but of regional identity. This presentation intends to explore the past (1920s) in order to make sense of present in two ways. The first is a demystification of Spanish-Colonial Revival via an examination of the political-economy of construction. It is my argument that, through the intersection of architecture, construction, and real-estate, the myth of “Hispanic California” was materialized. Secondly, this presentation seeks to grapple with the problematic legacy of the mythologized “Hispanic California” past. To put it simply, no heads turn when a new community is named after a hacienda, but the same could not be said about the term plantation, despite both terms have the same implications. Thus looking at construction and the iconography around it, we can understand the way in which power and difference is reproduced within both the built environment and discourse.