Lab 10-Isarithmic

Lab 10-Georgia Mean Annual Precipitation

If I had been able to figure it out, I would have liked to range graded this map, with different grayscale shading.  I struggled with Adobe Illustrator to trim the fills at the State boundaries.  In lieu of being able to range grade the map, I put a few additional ticks so the viewer could get a feel of the range leading to the isohyet lines.  Overall the contour/isohyet lines were straight forward to compute as I have produced dozens of topographic maps.  With more time and training, hopefully I'll be able to further enhance maps like these.  There is still much I want to learn with Illustrator!

Flow Map Correction-Lab 9

Yikes! 

While filing away some lab papers, I realized that my Flow Map that I posted below has a couple of errors in the data.  I overlooked that I should have displayed only the YEAR 2007 data numbers!  This would change my numbers so that Asia would have the largest group of immigrants for that particular year.  I also found that I made an error in the data source.
The data source should read:
Data Source:  2007 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics-U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security.

Boy is it tough being a human sometimes!

I regret the errors and have made the corrections to the map below.........to make things right, but I realize that there may be deductions on this assignment. Ouch! and Oops!

Bonus Exercise

Bonus Exercise

I chose to redo the Week 5 Lab exercise.  This was the Hispanic Population Study. After looking at the older map, I wasn't real pleased with the way it looked. I reviewed some the ESRI Mapping Center Maps and was able to get some ideas for changing my legend design and labels.   After 5 more weeks of practice with Adobe Illustrator, I felt more comfortable displaying the elements. I have posted the original map below. 

Week 9-Immigration Flow Map

Lab 9-Immigration Flow Map 1998-2007

I thought the initial challenge in doing this map was how to display the information.  The examples that are shown in the front page of the blog were outstanding examples.  I would have liked to have produced a map similar to one of those, but I didn't have the time (or perhaps knowledge?) to manipulate the individual regions effectively.  But something that I want to learn how to do!

At first I thought the use of the Adobe Illustrator pen tool was frustrating, but started getting a feel for it after a period of trail and error. It's a real valuable tool to know how to use.  I do like the color choices that are available in Adobe Illustrator as it enhances the artistic possibilities that are availble to the cartographer.  It seems to get easier every week. Whew!

Lab 8-Florida Housing Density

Lab 8-Dot Mapping

It seems that this particular Lab had some statistical challenges.  The density is based on the number of housing units per square mile.  Good intuition tells one that there are obviously more units in the more highly populated areas, rather than being evenly distrubuted over the entire county area.  After the initial computation of housing units per square mile, I reviewed county maps of Florida that showed the cities and towns and tried to place the dots in the higher population centers.  So there is a lot of "artistic liberty" in placing the dots (and some wild guesses in my case) in the correct postion.  With that said, I believe the map does show the general pattern of housing density for the state. Perhaps the housing units needed to be computed by city in each county?  Or some other statistical break? 

Overall a very long involved process to get roughly 2200 dots into this map.  I did learn a few things:  1) a dot map is time consuming, 2) not necessarily accurate but to show a general pattern  3) and finally this process can give you a stiff neck and carpal tunnel syndrome dragging a placing dots for hours and hours. But I'm glad that I had a chance to do it at least once in my life.  I also learned a few more shortcuts using

Adobe Illustrator. Also if I had the time, I would have liked to go back and get the scale of the map a little larger, so that it would be easier to read, but I already spent a number of days working with it. Very experiential!

Lab 7-Proportional Symbol Mapping

Lab 7 Proportional Symbol Mapping- I started feeling a little more comfortable with Adobe Illustrator. I experimented with the transparency and found something I felt like I could live with. Although, I didn't know if it was an issue (from a cartographic point) that the symbols that hang over the countries into the with white background change color. I still think the average viewer would get the picture. Layer management seems to be one of the keys for keeping your drawing organized and to help manage general craziness!  I did have a little trouble at first getting my projection from ArcMap to look right.  I also had a similar problem as a few other students did, that ArcMap was giving me a bogus scale.  I ended up starting a new map and reimporting the shapefile and reprojecting and it looked fine. I tried to use a natural breaks method for configuring the ranges and then took an average of the wine consumption within those ranges for the display in the legend.  Computing the symbol sizes for the proportions, seemed pretty straightforward.  Overall I thought it was a fun map to produce and it was interesting to see which countries were the big wine drinkers! Drink up!