African American Population in the United States

African American Population in the United States, a photo by DakotaDorn on Flickr.

This is a proportional symbol map.  Unlike a graduated symbol map, this one shows exact values and not relative.  ArcGis makes adjusting the size of the minimum and maximum values very easy and even displays the size of each before you change the setting.  There are many adjustments that ArcGis allows you to make on these types of maps, but I am still not to the level where I know everything yet.  With some practice and maybe some light reading I might be able to figure out the vast unknown which is ArcGis. 

North Carolina Residents Claiming American Ancestry by County- exercise 6

dorndd_exercise6, a photo by DakotaDorn on Flickr.

My first Choropleth map! To make this map we used Excel to calculate class breaks for our data.  Each way of calculating class breaks resulted in a different map.  Two of the maps represent the data in percentage and two of the maps have absolute data.  As you can see all four are different because of the different methods.  The hardest part of this assignment was figuring out which county was which.  by pulling up a map of North Carolina counties on the internet and comparing it to this one in Illustrator, I was able to find where each county was located.  Color choice was easy because I used Cynthia Brewer's "colorbrewer" website for selections.  I find Choropleth maps to be very effective in displaying data, and it makes it easy to see the results.