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.

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.