Lab 7: Choropleth Map

I mapped Basque-ancestry by state from 1980. Natural Breaks looks great, Quantiles looks terrible.

Cloropleth map of Canadian fatness

This is an choropleth map of obesity in Canada. I think it uses a standard deviation scheme, which allows it to name its categories "significantly higher/lower" [one standard deviation above/below?] than mean.

The healthiest parts of Canada seem to be Quebec and the west-coast. Inland is fatter.



Full image : Click here.

Lab 6: Dot Density

I used some outside sources as references to help complete this lab, including this, this, and this. The last one was especially helpful because it listed the actual number of pre-1939 houses by city, which [after doing some simple math] used to figure out how many dots I should cluster around that one city. This is a lot better method than wild guessing. The other sources two helped greatly in placing the non-city dots.

The basic problem was "How many dots should I use"/"How big should they be"...Since most parts of the state are sparsely populated, having them too-few/small would leave out a lot of detail. Having too many/big creates unintentional "megalopolises", maybe engulfing the whole county from one city. I'm happy with my final product because I think I mostly avoided that problem. [Except maybe at Wheeling (which is in the third county down in the northern panhandle).]

Murders Map for 2008 D.C. Metro Area

[Click to view the whole map].

A map plotting Murders in the year 2008 in the Washington area.
I think this is a good example of a well-done density map.* It conveys its information effectively. The story behind it is that somebody has been scouring police reports from local counties/cities, plotting them spatially at their reported street location, and including some minor info in each case (name, date, address of incident, cause of death). This is only 2008 data, but the guy has also done past years, mapped elsewhere on his site.

Here is the 2008 plotted data: http://www.burgersub.org/murders2k8.htm.

Each little flag is the instance of a single murder so far in 2008. It is not surprising to anyone with basic knowledge about this area that they mostly occur in the eastern part of the District of Columbia and into P.G. county. The only other places that any have occurred at all this year are scattered cities (like Manassas) with many immigrants and gang activity. GMU is in a safe part of Fairfax County: There has only been a single murder around here in 2008. Just a mile or so north of the GMU campus, some poor sucker named "Adulio Bonilla-Morales, 36; stabbed [to death] on 8/16/08". A little north of there, some other guy is listed as having been "shot by Fairfax County Police" at his house (that's the blue flag).

I am fascinated by this map.


* - (They aren't technically "dots", but in effect they are-- They plot single locations of single events. Which is actually more precise than most dot-density maps, I suppose, which are generalized).

Virginia, Maryland, Washington Map (Lab 5)

There were several challenging parts to this lab: One- We had to make a scale "from scratch", Two- We had to deal with labeling features that have the same value (MD, VA, DC) yet are much larger or smaller than each other, Three- Various visual features were hard to balance (the background gradient, the thickness of the county vs state lines, figure-ground issues).

My solutions to the problems (in order), were,
-- 1. I measured the distance of Virginia's southern border in ArcMap, I measured the same on my printed map, and then using simple mathematics I calculated what the scale would be for my printed map. I then did a little more math to find how many inches 50 miles would be (just over an inch), and made the scale bar using the line tool in Illustrator. [I made the scale bar in part because it maintains its accuracy even when blown up or shrunk...I am almost certain that the 1 inch=48 miles verbal scale is wrong on the image.]
-- 2a. At first my solution to the "labelling Washington" problem was to point a line out eastward from Washington, and connect it to a box with the words "Washington, DC" inside it. I abandoned this idea because I thought it looked bad, and instead decided to create an inset around the immediate Washington Metro Area, so that I could actually label the city of Washington on the map. To do this I had to use the clipping mask tool.
-- 2b. I decided against labelling "Virginia" much bigger just to fill up the state, and instead made it the same size as the "Maryland" label. I figured that visual balance is more important than taking up all the space, a 40-pt Virginia label vs a 24-pt Maryland would look terrible. (One other strange thing is that my eye sees the Maryland label as bigger than the Virginia label even though checking and rechecking keeps telling me they are both 24-pt...)
-- 3. At first I had a gradient radiating out from a single corner, but this left a lot of white space. I decided to create four separate gradients coming from each corner. I also made the counties dark grey for contrast purposes.

One other thing: he scale is correct on paper

Lab 4 : Copying labels for Harper's Ferry

I had a paper version of the original map of Harper's Ferry, WV and a blank AI file of the same (with all the labels removed). The goal was to copy the paper-map's labels exactly, "by hand". Here is a small version of my attempt.



I think it turned out well. The hardest thing is drawing precise lines; the second hardest thing is guessing the font-sizes on the piece of paper vs the screen.

...

Here is a much larger version that I exported (click to view the larger version):