Data Mining Published Maps: Integrating Health Data in Published Maps Into a GIS - Detroit, MI Case Study

One of the benefits of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is the ability to integrate various data sources into a single database. As GIS has grown in scope and depth, it has become fractured and allowed analysts to become more focused on their individual intellectual domain and generally has not fostered the level of discussion and integration that was originally theorized at the beginning of the expansion of GIS.  In GIS’s expansion, there is a clear break in the initial intent of the early developers to provide an interface in which one can combine intellectually diverse data that are spatially relevant to each other.  This presentation puts forward a methodology to repurpose data in a GIS to allow researchers across various disciplines to integrate data based upon theme, scale, and location such that analyses can be conducted to look for new meaningful analysis from existing work.  In the case of this analysis we have used Detroit, MI as the spatial focus of our methodology, and the field of Public and Environmental Health and Geography as the thematic context.  Instead of generating new data, this represents the use of archival data or old research into a GIS to reevaluate the data to see what new insights can be discovered through this integration.   This method demonstrates the efficacy of utilizing previously published research in order to introduce the concept of new spatial analyses of historic and recent data.  It further aims to address the appropriateness of this type integration of previous data into a GIS to enable other researchers to undertake this process when addressing the multi-faceted relationship between place, history, and public and environmental health outcomes, and to model potentially previously unknown spatial relationships as a result of this integration.