Lab 10

Lab 9: Web vs. Print

Here's the image for my Lab 9 map. In printing at home on a color jet the colors came out great, except for the fact it created a couple of arbitrary lines that split the color in the background. There was a line at the bottom, on one side a darker shade of the green and on the other a lighter. In my AI document there was nothing that I could find to explain this. I think that the darker color was the actual fill of my background. Aside from that, the printed copy looked great--actually, I was very surprised that they came out as I had envisioned and as the digital copy looked. I was very happy with the color ramping--I choosing the colors I did because I wanted to not only make the larger percentages stand out, but also the lower values, because they are just as significant within my data set. I also printed out the image in the lab using the color laser jet printer, in which the colors came out dramatically different. They were much, much darker and muted than they are in the digital copy giving the map an entirely different feel.

Housing in MD

Here's my image for Lab 8:

Choropleth Maps & Classification Schemes

Here are my two choropleth maps: one classified into quintiles, the other equal interval. Unfortuetly, visually there didn't seem to be much of a difference in these two classification schemes, and I presumed there would be. Looking at the raw data, the second lowest class in equal interval has 4 more states in this than quintiles. If the data had been more varied this would make a large difference; sending states into other classes, and changing the overall visual appearance of the map. If I had chosen 3 or 4 classification schemes instead I think that the difference in the two schemes would have been more apparent. In retrospect, I would have choosen a fewer number of classes.

Choropleth Maps

This is a map I found on CNN, showing how much fundraising was done in each state throughout the country in the 2008 Presidential Election and Primaries. I thought it was neat because you can also look at each county in each state and sort by every candidate to see exactly how much was raised. Not only is it a great example of a choropleth map, but also a great interactive map that allows you to store and show a large amount of data. Check out the site where I found this map to see the full extent: http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/map/

Dots!

I completely forgot to post Lab 6 last Thursday, but here it is:

Overall, I am really happy with the way it turned out. I wished that I had had a base map without county lines so that I could have made the county boundaries a lighter gray and the state outline black. Other than that it was just tedious creating and placing all of the dots.

Lab 5: VA, DC, MD