But recently, social scientists have begun to use GIS to map both demographic and historical trends. This tool allowed me to map indicators that might contribute to urban quality of life: colored sections showing crime, environmental code violations, and housing violations may be laid on top of one another and thus combined. This will assist the viewer in identifying "hot-spots," areas with a confluence of several indicators. Additionally, GIS allows for gradated colors, displaying intensity of the indicators in a particular geographic area. GIS maps can be created to show an area as large as continents, or as small as a street in a city. The mapping that I propose to do is on the very specific, plat-lot level. Analysis at the plat-lot level in Providence is so new that many challenges (such as accurate, complete information about specific houses) have arisen in the acquisition of information and its transfer into maps

The information, in this case, is the crime dataset. The set includes every crime report written in Providence in the past 15 years, allowing for comparisons over time and space. [Click here for more information about the crime dataset]

Parcel-level mapping
Specifically, I mapped crime on the parcel level. Each property has an id "platlot" number that is individual to that parcel alone. This type of mapping is far more specific and precise thatn mapping by address, since there may be duplicate or missing addresses in the city database. Unfortunately, since there is no electronic table that matches every address in Providence to a platlot number, much of my matching was done manually. [Click here for more information about this matching process and what we are doing to ameliorate the problem]

Assigning crime reports to the specific property on which the violation occurred was an important characteristic of my methods, since it turns out that increase or decrease of crime is house-specific. If I had simply mapped and counted crimes in a block or neighborhood, we would have an inaccurate view of how crime had changed. [Click here for more discussion about this conclusion.]

To view these parcel-level crime maps, click here.