Garreau's Dixie

Garreau's outline of what he thought made up the region of Dixie seemed to hit the nail on the head. Being from Louisiana when first examining his map of Dixie i was skeptical thinking he extended the vertical extent of the region to far north. After mapping the data that you gave us in class it seems as though the region Garreau mapped was quite accurate. Although i do not think that having the word Dixie in a business name perfectly describes a region it does show that people associate with that name farther north than i ever thought. Closer examination revealed that even as encompassing his region with the automotive data there were still multiple areas outside of Garreau's outline for example along Interstate 75 going north towards Dayton there were numerous establishments with the word Dixie in the name. This shows to me that they also identify as being somewhat in the land of Dixie and maybe when Garreau did his study he could not find any evidence of this in these areas. Also in Miami metro area there are also Dixie named businesses where Garreau included this area into "The Islands". Other data that would have been helpful defining this area would be the location of plantations that is a true definer of Dixie. Actually mapping this area that he describes as Dixie out certainly helped visualize what he was speaking towards as well as the data that we embedded on the map as well backed up his claim for Dixie. Although there is no definite border as we saw using the embedded data there is certainly a large part of the united states that believes to be in a part of the Dixie land. Getting a better since of region is important when defining areas such as this one because of the varied ways that it can be interpreted can change dramatically what you would include and not include.