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For those who have the know-how on using it effectively (or the patience to figure it out), QGIS can be an extraordinarily useful tool for combining layers of data, geographic information, and images. Although the map below presents a clean, simple combination of all three, the process in making it was by no means easy.
In the example below, the base layer is geographic data contained in the shape files of buildings in Mecklenburg County (marked Davidson_buildings on the legend) to which I have added a georeferenced map of Davidson College’s campus dating from 1974. These two layers are interesting juxtapositions in of themselves especially for those who wish to conduct a historical comparison of a certain space. However, in this example, the map stretches beyond mere historical comparison and the combination of building shape files and the map of Davidson College’s campus becomes the background for the shape file data on the number of international students’ currently living in the dorms.
While this QGIS map does not present a unique or insightful comment about the history of Davidson College or the composition of its student body, the map does exhibit the capabilities of the QGIS software and also provides insight into the difficulties that can arise when using this tool.
First, using QGIS, the user can georeference (i.e. embed geographic data points in the image) images and the latitude and longitude lines to align images, shape files and data. In the map above, I aligned the 1974 map of Davidson College visually with the building shape files; however, the latitude and longitude points were useful it that they connected the location of buildings with the data about dorms. Second, I combined the geographic information of the dorm data with the previous layers and formed a new shape file layer that is seen in the green/blue tinged dorms. Here, the shade of the color of the building represents how densely each dorm is populated with international students. As can be seen on the legend, the more international students living the dorm, the darker the shade; thus, the viewer is easily able to see that Sentelle has the most international students.
Although I stumbled a few times in the process of getting to this finished product (as can been seen in the wonky orientation of Knox’s polygon shape file and the frustrated file name “Output Hopeful”), the ultimate outcome is a clean, visually simplistic representation of both historical and numerical data and a testament to the useful possibilities of QGIS.