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.

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.