Geography and Environmental Sciences Student Wins Poster Contest at GIS in the Rockies

Published: Nov. 5, 2024 By
headshot of Jennifer Hathaway

Jennifer Hathaway won the student poster contest at GIS in the Rockies (http://gisintherockies.org/), a local conference for GIS professionals. The poster is part of her thesis work examining queer women spaces in the 1970s and today.

For the map of 1970s, Hathaway used a 1956 zoning map, digitized by Mandy Rees, and included details about R-0 neighborhoods: neighborhoods that excluded non-married, non-related people from living in the same household. She also used a radical feminist magazine, Big Mama Rag, published from 1973-1983 to find locations of businesses, addresses, event spaces, conferences, etc., that may cater to queer women at the time.

For the current map, Hathaway expanded the scale and looked at Denver and adjacent counties. She pulled Census data and voting patterns for 2020 and mapped those using a bivariate color scheme. In addition, she used a variety of resources-- social media, marketing websites, online directories-- to locate current queer, women owned businesses and mapped those locations.