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Title: Aggregating community maps
This paper is motivated by a practical problem: many U.S. states have public hearings on "communities of interest" as part of their redistricting process, but no state has as yet adopted a concrete method of spatializing and aggregating community maps in order to take them into account in the drawing of new boundaries for electoral districts. Below, we describe a year-long project that collected and synthesized thousands of community maps through partnerships with grassroots organizations and/or government offices. The submissions were then aggregated by geographical clustering with a modified Hausdorff distance; then, the text from the narrative submissions was classified with semantic labels so that short runs of a Markov chain could be used to form semantic sub-clusters. The resulting dataset is publicly available, including the raw data of submitted community maps as well as post-processed community clusters and a scoring system for measuring how well districting plans respect the clusters. We provide a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of this methodology and conclude with proposed directions for future work.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2138110 1907612 2106672
PAR ID:
10388766
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
SIGSPATIAL '22: Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1 to 12
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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