Two-Variable Choropleth (Lab 10)

Since double-variable choropleths are very hard to understand, my goal was to create a very straightforward one. This was a big conceptual/design challenge. The main thing I did was drop any mention of numbers in the legend and instead used "low/high", based on standard deviations away from the mean.

Basically I created a hypothesis to "test", which is that the lowest-density county will have the lowest crime rate and the highest-density will have the highest crime rate ("urbanization causes a rise in crime rates"). After doing the math, I plotted the points in excel and saw that a fair number of counties were way outside this basic regression line. This very simple "model" doesn't predict urbanized counties well (I added dots to show the major cities, Charlotte, Raleigh-Durham, etc.) to show this to the viewer.

[One problem is that the dark-green counties don't have "low" crime rates- They have crimes rates much lower than *predicted* If density is 6 standard deviations above average, and crime is "only" 3 above average [which is still high in absolute numbers], the county is dark green). I'm not sure how to show this in a very simple manner.]

I probably made this needlessly hard, and wound up doing a lot of math/statistics to derive this map. I'm still not sure how logical it all is to the viewer.

My choropleth map in color (Lab 9)

a very large version

Lab 9 was to remake our choropleth map to include color. I was able to take advantage of this because my data has a "qualitiative" division as well as the quantitiative. Some states never had any Basque settlement, whereas others did (mainly southeastern Idaho and northern Nevada and radiating out from there). Red=No "appreciable" Basque settlement, Green=Yes "appreciable" Basque settlement. So, I colored all states reporting "under 0.01%" in red. For the states that did receive Basque immigration, I used a green color ramp to show how concentrated they were by state. Conveniently, red and green are also the colors of the Basque flag, which I blew up from the previous version. I made various other minor improvements including stealing somebody's Basque-flag clipart. (I also learned that the Nebraska result was a census filing error in 1980, or something like that, giving it several thousand Basques when the state really has almost none; Nebraska should be in red in reality).

I printed a color copy using the lab printer, and it looks pretty different from what I am seeing on the screen. The colors are much brighter/stronger on the printed copy, I suppose because the screens in here are very bright, making the colors look lighter than what they "really are". On paper, the red appears much darker than I wanted it to be. I would definitely find a lighter red if I could get a second shot, because I want to emphasize the green-scale, and not the red. (I wanted to say that the red states are so unimportant to the subject being mapped that they are "off the [green] scale".) Maybe I should have just kept everything on a green scale and made the eastern states a very-light green...

Lab 8: Proportional Symbol Map

Drawing the cow was by far the hardest part.

A very large version

American vs German World War I maps

Being that tomorrow's class is November 11th, WWI Armistice Day, I found two maps appropriate for that occasion. These two maps show how color can-be/is used in map-making.

Each map presents the same information, the alliances in Europe during World War One. The only difference is the choice of color-- Each nationality/language shows their own side in green and the other side in red.

(WWI was probably the stupidest, most pointless war ever fought in Europe, so if I were to make the map I'd put every belligerent in whatever color best signifies stupidity and green for countries smart enough to stay neutral.)

English-language Map of WWI belligerents (American source)


German-language map of WWI belligerents (German source)