The final assignment of this course covered a multitude of important topics, mostly involving spatial data, its integrity, and how it may be manipulated to cater to differing narratives. Working through the assignment showed me how big of an impact scale can have on vector data. As seen in the images below, scale is directly related to resolution in that smaller scales have much higher resolutions. In other terms, the more one zooms out, the more generalized features will become. Thus, it is important to use the smaller scales when possible to show features accurately.
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| Comparing Flowlines at Varying Resolutions |
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| Comparing Waterbodies at Varying Resolutions |
Another important topic covered in this lab was gerrymandering. This is a term that is unfortunately very problematic for the United States, in that it often affects election results and so on. It essentially consists of lawmakers redrawing districts to tailor to their desires. The way in which one draws a district will inevitable impact what political party most of those living in that district consist of. This practice is obviously very unethical and can be seen by assessing district boundaries. The "compactness" or how rounded/together a district is, can be a great measure for if gerrymandering occurred in the drawing of its boundaries. One of the worst examples of gerrymandering can be visualized in North Carolinas 12th district, where the compactness score was the worst of all other districts across the country.