journal_vol51no1 - 91

Making a Location a Place
Whether we find out more about places, relationships, or even making
informed decisions, maps serve as effective infographics, presenting
multiple variables in a visual way and providing spatial structure
to enhance the story of a particular place or group.
from more than 400 interviews with students, faculty, and staff at 27 institutions of
higher education in the United States, they concluded that " individual relationships
can be educationally powerful, but a network of overlapping relationships is more
likely to meet a student's evolving needs than any single mentor can " (p. 15). In their
study of themed LLCs, Frazier and Eighmy (2012) further found that " students in
residential learning communities with direct and intentional involvement on the part
of the faculty and resident staff had a higher level of overall student satisfaction than
did students in communities with less faculty and staff involvement " (p. 11).
Placing Residential Colleges on the Map
This project collects information about RCs and then plots the colleges on a map,
which allows readers to visualize and access layered information through a spatial lens
rather than through the tabular data in traditional text formats. Furthermore, the map
can be used by RC staff to help advertise and validate the existence of their colleges to
prospective students and to administrators.
Togglable layers enable users to quickly identify spatial patterns and reference
data about each residential college. These layers contain queried attributes and information
on each RC, which provides data on who lives in a community, how students
interact, and what spaces the communities utilize. As users interact with the map,
they can examine the cultural and linguistic diversity in RCs as well as the evolving
nature of these institutions. The non-linear presentation of information on interactive
maps opens a wider view of literacy to include texts that are multimodal (such
as audio, images, sound, graphics, and film) and can contribute to the development
of multiliteracies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; New London Group, 1996; Walsh, 2010).
Faculty associated with RCs-as well as administrators, student affairs professionals,
and graduate students-can benefit from information the map provides both as an
overview of RCs and as a detailed description of each. Specifically, a new faculty-in-residence
who would like to initiate a formal visit with another RC, an administrator
planning to establish an RC on their campus, or a student affairs professional seeking
connections or contacts in other RCs can easily access the map and quickly make
connections, find contacts, and obtain the needed information.
Maps are an important tool for conducting research, but they can also be accessed
directly by higher education staff at residential colleges to advertise or support
their residential college. When touring campuses, parents and students are looking
for housing options that provide residents with the greatest chance of success. The
interactive map can show comparable living arrangements within the United States
higher education system. In addition, when administrators and policy makers are in
the process of auditing their institutions, RCs can validate their existence by serving
as a cartographic tool to provide a visual representation of other schools' RCs quickly.
88 The Journal of College and University Student Housing
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