Racial Populations in Denver, Colorado

Racial Populations in Denver, Colorado, a photo by DakotaDorn on Flickr.

Denver, Colorado is the sight of my newest map.  In this assignment I was to make four identical maps of downtown Denver and keep them at the same scale.  I then added data of different racial populations to each map.  Each map had to have a different color pattern, and the class breaks had to be the same for all of the maps.  This is the part that proved tough while working on this.  The reason is that Asian populations in Denver are very small so finding a class break that worked for all races was tough.  In the end I picked one that showed the other three well, and doesn't show much from the Asian population.  By not showing much though I am saying that there are not many that live there, so the data is still getting shown.  Another area of this map that was challenging was fitting all four maps and there legends in the document.  After changing fonts, adjusting font sizes, and scaling down the sizes of my maps I was able to make it work.

U.S. Population between the Ages of 18 and 21

U.S. Population between the Ages of 18 and 21, a photo by DakotaDorn on Flickr.

This was my first ArcGis only map that I have made.  After doing choropleth mapping on Adobe Illustrator and then learning how to do it on ArcGis, it is so much easier!  ArcGis allows you to make a choropleth map in a mere minute or two instead of a couple hours.  Doing a choropleth map of the entire country by county on Illustrator would take a very long time. Another cool feature is the ability to change the class breaks on ArcGis very quickly without having to do any calculations on Excel. The legend on this map was also very easy.  All that needed to be done was click a button and then adjust the settings for your legend and what you wanted displayed.  I didn't really have too much trouble making this map, it was more of just figuring out how to use ArcGis that took time.

Gun Ownership and Gun Murders by State- exercise 8

dorndd_exercise8, a photo by DakotaDorn on Flickr.

This map also displays data that interests me.  In this map I am comparing gun ownership in a state, to gun murders in that same state.  To do this I first made a choropleth map of the gun murders (per 100,000 people), the darker the red the more murders.  Then I made a graduated circle map of gun ownership, where the bigger the circle the more gun ownership in that state (per 100,000 people).  The message I was trying to get across with this multivariate map is that the states that own more guns committ less gun murders.  I find there is a positive coorelation between the two.  The biggest difficulty I had with this map and something I would change if I could go back, is the size of the biggest circle.  I wish the map would show a little more variance in circle sizes, but I feel it still gets my message across. 

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.