Data with a spatial reference such as a city name can be joined to non-spatial data tables to make the data accessible to mapping software. The map above shows city boundaries displayed with a graduate color scheme based on attribute information, in this case, an area measurement.

This project was a collaboration between Catherine Brinkley, professor in the UC Davis Department of Human Ecology, and DataLab. Catherine sought to understand the general plan documents for the cities in the state of California through topic modeling. Catherine and her team assembled the many general plan documents and DataLab staff performed a topic modeling analysis on the text of the documents and joined the resulting table to a spatial vector data containing city boundaries to allow the dataset to be easily mapping in a GIS.

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