Scenario

It’s early 2017. You are working with a local, community-based non-profit organization in New York City. The organization has, in recent years, been actively championing programs and policies designed to bridge the “digital divide” by providing access to broadband Internet infrastructure for low-income communities. Given the City’s recent push for public Wi-Fi (including the LinkNYC kiosks, open Wi-Fi in major parks, etc.), you’ve been asked to help determine your organization’s specific positions on the successes and shortcomings of these efforts. Your team has isolated several pertinent preliminary questions. The initial questions to consider are

The answers to these questions will be helpful in determining the organization’s next steps for both programming and advocacy, and you’ve been asked to create a map to help in this process.

Assignment & Deliverable Format

Complete the exercise below, answering the questions embedded in the exercise.

After completing the exercise, create one map composition responding to the Scenario. At a minimum, your map composition should

  1. cover the full extent of New York City with enough reference material (labels, etc.) to orient your reader
  2. include the point locations of the Wi-Fi hotspots in 2016 throughout the city overlaid with the borough boundaries
  3. offer summary information about the distribution of the hotspots throughout the boroughs (you may choose to compile this information in a table, in a chart, as text labels or call-outs, etc.)
  4. include your name and the date of the map’s creation
  5. include a scale bar, north arrow, legend, and abbreviated data sources (author, date)
  6. include a meaningful and descriptive title that contains at least the what (Wi-Fi hotspot locations), the where (New York City), and the when (2016) represented by the map.

A successful map composition will clearly, quickly, and effectively communicate your assessment of the relative distribution of Wi-Fi hotspots in New York City. The map composition should be 8.5 by 11 inches, portrait orientation—imagine it will be added to a file folder of information collected by your team in the scenario.

<aside> 📢 In designing every map, consider the questions we pose in class about the maps we read. Consider the communicative clarity, tone, and implicit suggestions inherent in the cartographic decisions made when compiling and composing map-based information. Consider your audience and the map’s purpose.

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Data

<aside> 💾 Download and unzip the exercise data package, saving it to your working directory.

Exercise data packages are accessible via Google Drive with a Columbia University UNI login. If you would like a copy of the full course materials, see here.

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Before we begin working with the data, let’s discuss the data files we'll be working with. (You can access them in Windows Explorer Windows+e or by previewing the data package contents in the download link above. Navigate to the \vector\ folder in the data package.)