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. 

Number of State Parks by State- exercise 7

dorndd_exercise7, a photo by DakotaDorn on Flickr.

I recently got into camping and backpacking and because of that I scour the internet looking for good places to go.  This assignment gave us the freedom to choose our own map data.  Most of the places I have been looking to travel to have been state parks, so it only made sense that I map them!  I found data of state park numbers per state online and went to work.  The process of making a graduated symbol map is relatively easy and this type of map shows the data well I think.  The biggest issue I ran into while making this map is deciding how big I wanted my biggest circle to be.  After many attempts I managed to find a size that allowed my smallest circle to still be visible.  displaying the data in the legend was also easy as all I did was take circles off the map and put them in the legend.  I think the reason I really enjoyed making this map is because I mapped something that interests me.