Maps and Mappers of the 2024 Calendar – Katherine Rudzki – July

Tell Us About Yourself

I’m a GIS Analyst at Summit Design and Engineering Services where I manage data and collection processes for projects focused on asset maintenance. I started my career in GIS on a whim; I was thinking of getting my masters in Geology but realized I would need to fill a GIS-sized hole in my undergraduate transcript before applying. I enrolled in a professional certificate for GIS and Data Communication at the University of Vermont. Everything clicked into place, I realized I’m a ‘spatial’ thinker and GIS was my new playground. I’m only 3 years into my GIS career at this point and I’m loving every minute of it. 

Tell us the story behind your map:

It’s a silly concept – where, along major routes in the contiguous United States, can you find rounded latitude/longitude pairs? I credit the concept to Joseph Kerski, PhD, GISP, who finds and documents these points as he travels the world for conferences. When I finished the map it was interesting to see what patterns emerged.There are swaths of roadway where you can find a pair at regular intervals, and swaths that have none at all. The states of West Virginia and Rhode Island have no pairs along their interstates. There are three diagonal pairs along the I-5 in California: (37, -121), (36, -120), and (35, -119). Many of the highways in the middle states have regular intervals of pairs.

TTell us about the Tools, data, etc., that you used to make the map:

I started out by creating a matrix of what latitude and longitude can be found in the lower 48 states. I found coordinates for the four corners of the continental US – plus some room for error – and extrapolated the matrix with Excel. That gave me 1,586 pairs that I could import into ArcGIS. I then clipped those points to the boundary of the continental United States. The full map of rounded pairs was way too crowded, so to make it more digestible and to add another layer of interest I decided to select points that were within 10 miles of major interstates. For that, I took a dataset of primary US routes and edited that to show the US Interstate system. I then buffered the interstates to 10 miles and clipped the Lat/Long pairs to that buffer.