In the Million Dollar Blocks article the use of mapping as a visualization tool allowed the project team to uncover critical relationships between sets of information. From there, trends were uncovered that present a new method of analyzing our criminal justice system, as it revealed concentrated spatial areas, or “blocks” that have a high density of poverty and incarcerated citizens.

What I find exciting about these mapping techniques is their ability to support and argue for change in social public policy that redirects government expenditures from prisons to vulnerable local infrastructure. I’m interested in how other social inequities can be examined and further understood through mapping exercises that reveal structural problems in government policy. The design of mapped data sets therefore has a great potential for arguing for policy change.