Recently, authors David Weisburd, Elizabeth Groff, and Sue-Ming Yang published a book titled The Criminology of Place: Street Segments and Our Understanding of the Crime Problem. The crux of the book is that in Criminology and other disciples have a long history of using geographic units of analysis that are area based. That is, we have become accustomed to using polygons as units of analysis. Part of the reason for the use of area based units of analysis is that demographic and social data are available through sources like the United States Census Bureau. In the book, the authors make …

New to Cartographica 1.4 are the Spatial Join tools. Spatial Joins are used to combine the data attributes of two or more layers. The Spatial Join operation creates a new layer that is a combination of attributes from Join and Target layers. The Spatial Join functions are akin to the Overlay functions except that the Spatial Join procedure does not change the geometry of the layers. Spatial Joins can be used for many different purposes and there are many options for determining how the join will be processed. A Spatial Join can be performed on point, line, or polygon …

Richard Florida is the well-known author of the book "The Creative Class" which describes the rise and the importance of a socio-economic class of individuals that Florida believes drives economic and social development. According to a Wikipedia, the creative class is made up of two separate groups of workers that make up about 30 percent of the U.S. workforce. The first of these groups is the Super-Creative Core: This group comprises about 12 percent of all U.S. jobs. It includes a wide range of occupations (e.g. science, engineering, education, computer programming, research), with arts, design, and media …

The Center for Disease Control monitors various diseases within the United States. Often the CDC produces data for public use that can be used for scholarly and educational purposes. For this post I downloaded diabetes data from 2009 from this CDC website. The CDC are available for download in .xls format, so they need to be converted for use in Cartographica. After the data are downloaded, load the files into a spreadsheet program and save the file as a .csv. According to CDC data more than 25 million Americans have been diagnosed with diabetes and the rates of diabetes have …

For this post I found data on Statistics Canada, which is a governmental website that provides access to data on various topics within Canada. The website includes spatial data for creating maps and variable data for creating tables. To start you need to get a spatial file. I decided to get data for Provincial regions within Canada. To download the Provincial Regions shapefile to the Provincial Region Page and click on the link "ger_000b11a…." After you download the shapefile import it into Cartographica by choosing File > Import Vector Data. To download basic population data on Canadian provinces and territories go …