Labeling & Type

I found a great map with a good use of type placement, font, color, etc in the Fairfax County's GIS & Mapping: Map Gallery. The map shows Fairfax County's Elementary Schools and their appropriate districts. It's a in a PDF format, so I can't save it as picture, but here's the link.

Mollweide

Here's my graphic for Lab 3, Mollweide projection. This was not quite as difficult as I had suspected, but it did take a few tries to get the measurements correct.

Projections, oh my!

Projections are my least favorite thing about geography. It just seems there are ENDLESS possibilities, and none are the perfect solution. I don't like the run around. None the less I hit the internet to find an exciting map projection. In my wandering I found a cool blog called the Map Room. I found an article that was in the magazine Mental_Floss, called "3 Controversial Maps." I thought this one was interesting for my projection post because it illustrates the main problems that occur with translating a sphere to a flat surface.




Check out the article here for the other 2 'controversial' maps included in the article along with a full explanation of this one.

Interesting Map...a little late.

I found this map while clicking around on various geography related sites. This is a map of the results from the 2004 US Presidential Election. This first map is a very generic version of the results, red representing state where a majority of the voters cast a ballot for republican. Blue represents where a majority of the voters who voted democratic.The map below tries to represent the raw data more accurately*, where purple represents counties where only a slim majority voted republican. I thought this was a good illustration of no only how data can be represented in different ways through a map, but also how changing the scale you are representing can change the overall impact of a map.
On this website they also do some cool things with cartograms, check it out here.
*This is my interpurtation of the map, others map think that it could be more inaccurate...

Geiod? Ellipsoid? Sphere?

Illustration for Lab 2:

Geography Links

Here are some links that I find useful:

Map Projections

I like this website because it contains all of the information you could ever want to know about map projections. This is not because I particularly like map projections, actually it's quite the contrary. I find that they tend to make my head hurt. This website is useful because it goes through all of the different types of projections, what properties they distort/preserve, equations for map projections (that's bound to give me a migraine), and a history of different map projections. I find this useful to refresh and reinforce my knowledge of projections. (Did I mention that this is my least favorite part of geography?)

2000 Census Info

This website, although pretty generic, contains TONS of data that can be used in researching and collecting data for many different maps. Even though as we approach 2010 when we will have an infinite amount of up-to-date data, this is still a great resource. There is also community profile information including income and poverty data through the 2007 American Community Survey.

Victoria Transportation Encyclopedia

I have found this useful because I have an interest within the geography field in urban planning. This online encyclopedia is published and maintained by the Victoria Transport Policy Institute in British Columbia. It includes studies for promoting and achieving more efficient, less congested transportation solutions. The website includes 'strategies to achieve specific objectives' such as congestion reduction, energy conservation, promoting health and fitness, and parking solutions.