Social Explorer

The Social Explorer website can definitely be used for doing research into the social, cultural, and ethnic histories of places. There's a lot of options you can choose from to make a good looking map. You can choose from population to percent of people born in Europe living across the U.S. You can see the percent born in Europe if you follow the link on the bottom of this post. I was really surprised to see how many people born in Europe lived in the U.S. So i basically just fooled around with the website and made a bunch of different maps. You can check them out if you follow the links below.




Map 1: % Born in Europe

You can see in this map that they're definitely more concentrated in the northeastern portion of the U.S.

The next map I focused on the unemployment percentage focused in the Boston area.

Map 2: Unemployment in Boston

Mapping Music

When it comes to music I feel like there are a lot of different ways to map it. Maybe you want to know where the artists of all the top songs on the radio are from. You could map, let’s say, the top 40 songs on the radio. When you figure out where the artist’s home town is you can put a point down on the map. You could also maybe make a buffer around popular radio stations in your area. The buffer would go as far as the radio signal reaches. That would be cool to see how far certain radio stations broadcast to.

Another way you could map music is to find all the bands under a certain record label and make a map out of that. I think that a really cool map would be to follow your favorite bands, and track their tour around the country. It would show just how many shows they do in a tour and how far they have to travel to make a living performing for people all around the country. You could also map the different music venues in a certain state. This would probably be a lot of points, but you could make it cool to look at by making the dot bigger relative to the venues’ size. As you can see there’s a lot of different directions you can go in for this kind of map for music. Below is a link that shows a map of "The Prison Band" going on tour.

Tour Map