Penn State alumna, graduate student partner on campus safety mapping project

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — When Dana Cuomo, an alumna of Penn State’s Department of Geography, sought to visualize data from a gender-based violence research project at Lafayette College, she reached out to her alma mater for help. The result was a collaboration between Cuomo and current Penn State geography graduate student Lily Houtman that used cartography to shed light on critical campus safety issues.

Cuomo, who earned her dual title doctorate in women’s studies and geography from Penn State in 2015, is a faculty member at Lafayette College and co-director of the Gender-Based Violence Research Lab. One of the lab’s projects, called the Harm Mapping Project, uses a feminist and spatial perspective to better understand how the built environment contributes to gender-based violence on campus.

“The goal of the Harm Mapping Project is to use feminist geography to think about gender-based violence from a more spatial perspective to better understand how the built environment on campus contributes to these kinds of harm,” Cuomo said.

To help bring this vision to life, Cuomo turned to Lorraine Dowler, her former adviser and Penn State professor of geography and of women's, gender and sexuality studies, to see if a current Penn State student might be interested in joining the project. That student was Lily Houtman, who quickly saw an opportunity to put their training in critical cartography into practice.

“I heard about the project and was immediately very interested,” Houtman said. “Feminist and critical cartography doesn’t always get to be my core research, but it’s definitely something I’m interested in and have experience in. Whenever I get to do a project related to that in any way, I’m very eager to hop on.”

The project at Lafayette College was already well underway when Houtman joined. Cuomo’s team of undergraduates had conducted a participatory mapping exercise, asking more than 500 students to mark locations on campus where they experienced or felt vulnerable to different forms of harm. Students placed stickers on campus maps to show incidents of verbal abuse, unwanted touching, sexual assault, physical assault, stalking and feelings of vulnerability.

Cuomo said the project was inspired by a desire to move beyond typical gender-based violence prevention work, which often focuses on bystander intervention and alcohol and drug abuse education. She added that traditional campus safety data like Clery Act crime reports do not capture the full range of gender-based violence, missing more subtle or less frequently reported experiences.

“The official crime reporting Clery data is not going to capture things like verbal abuse or where students feel vulnerable to experiencing these kinds of gender-based violence,” Cuomo said. “We are really trying to understand how the campus feels differently to different people based on their intersecting social identities. If you have a population of people who is walking around campus feeling fearful on a regular basis, that’s important to know.”

When Houtman joined the project, they were tasked with transforming that data into meaningful visualizations. Houtman said they were deliberate in using feminist design principles to guide their cartographic decisions and that the team carefully chose the map types to avoid misrepresenting the data or reinforcing harmful narratives.

“When thinking about different map types to display this data, some things didn’t work like heat maps and dot density maps,” Houtman said. “Heat maps have historical links to policing and racial violence. Dot density maps risked people thinking those dots meant actual locations and individuals, which would not be true. We were trying to disaggregate this from the individual and focus on the collective data, and we didn’t want any individual person identified.”

Instead, Houtman and the team decided on proportional symbol mapping, a technique that uses circles that vary in size based on the quantity or frequency of data at each location. This method allowed them to clearly show patterns of harm across campus without suggesting exact locations or individuals, which helped protect participant anonymity.

Once completed, Cuomo said the maps highlighted patterns of harm across campus, with certain locations standing out as significant “harm spots.”

“We had some fraternities that were kind of a consistent theme,” she said. “Greek life is very big at Lafayette, particularly in relation to the proportion of the student body. We had a local bar, that was a prime kind of harm spot, too. Most of the incidents of sexual assault are happening in private space locations like dorms and fraternities. More of the incidents of stalking were reported to have happened in more public space locations.”

To build on these insights, Cuomo and her team launched a second phase that gathered qualitative data with a series of four walking focus groups. In these sessions, students discussed what about specific campus spaces made them feel safe or unsafe and took photos to document and comment on their experiences.

According to the researchers, one significant finding was the role of lighting in how safe students felt. The maps spurred actionable recommendations to the administration to improve lighting and address areas of vulnerability.

Cuomo and her team have since met with Lafayette's president, Board of Trustees and athletics department to discuss the findings and recommendations. 

“Every time that we’ve met, we’ve presented the data from the project, including the maps,” she said. “The maps are what people are really drawn to. Being able to visualize the data in this way has been really powerful in trying to convey the story of harm that’s happening on campus.”

Looking ahead, Cuomo said the project is moving into a writing phase to share findings through journal articles. She also is working with campus leadership to implement changes based on the recommendations, while the maps themselves continue to spark conversations and find new uses on campus.

The project’s maps were displayed on large posters in the student center during Sexual Assault Awareness Month this past April. The maps have also found unexpected uses, including being integrated into Lafayette’s first-year orientation program to help new students understand the local context of harm. The team is searching for a permanent home on campus to house the large-format maps so that the findings remain part of ongoing discussions.

“Geography is amazing,” Cuomo said. “I’m constantly reminded of how important it is to be able to visualize data in this way. Mapping is a really powerful tool.”

The work was supported by the GeoGraphics Lab in the Penn State Department of Geography, which provided funding and infrastructure throughout its development. It was the lab’s first externally funded project.