What Digital Maps Can Tell Us About the American Way

Life, liberty and the pursuit of <a href="http://www.trading666.com/lv-handbags-lv-A-quality-handbags-f2-3-c3-9.html"><strong>wholesale lv handbags online from china </strong></a> … mappiness? That is the humorous rubric for a new series of digital maps created by the Scholars’ Lab, a Web site run by the University of Virginia Library about developments in the digital humanities.Kelly Johnston, a Geographic Information Systems specialist at the lab who created the maps, explained that he tried to convert the qualities of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness into quantities that could be visualized in a map — the kind of pursuit explored in a recent New York Times article.As Mr. Johnston noted, "Rows of numbers stashed away in academic journals and U.S. Census tables come alive when mapped to show comparisons with their neighbors both near and far."For “life,” he looked at life expectancy at birth. The South fared the worst by far in this category. For “liberty,” Mr. Johnston <a href="http://www.trading666.com/others-brand-cigarettes-f2-66.html"><strong>wholesale newport 100s cigarettes online </strong></a> used figures for the involuntarily <a href="http://rooyee.org/view.php?id=26506"><strong>Moderator: amandadp2's blog: chanel handbags for sale, pound stupid</strong></a> institutionalized population as a proportion of the total population. Counties with large prison populations had it worst.The “pursuit of happiness” map compared the ratio of arts, entertainment and recreation establishments to the total population. On this map, people in Wyoming and Montana are apparently bursting with joy. The high ratios in those states, however, are more of a result of their small populations than glee.