Final Project

Final project map. A map of the United States showing the mean ACT score and participation rates by state for the year 2009. The participants who took the exam were high school seniors.

Week 11: Google Earth

I chose this area to locate the Great Lakes Wind farm. It's located in the eastern part of Lake Michigan. This location is in a zone that has the most projected power output per turbine. It is close in proximity to major existing transmission lines. The distance is far enough offshore (15 km) to mitigate any noise or shadows cast by the towers but close enough for acceptable water depth.

Week 10: Isarithmic Mapping

The above map shows the mean precipitation of the state of Georgia completed for the week ten lab exercise. I used my pencil skills I picked up last week to create the contoured lines. The task seemed daunting at first because of all the numbers on the map, but after a while the process sunk in. I made the greys transparent to show the counties underneath. The hardest part of this lab was to match the border of the state with the lines. That task took some time.

Week 9: Flow Maps

The above map was completed using the Week 9: Flow Maps lab. It shows the immigration to the United States by region. I chose a 30 point arrow for my largest value and calculated the rest using the equation in this lesson's pdf file. Since there is only seven arrows, I decided to used the specific values rather than range graded lines. I became very familiar with the pencil tool this exercise and seemed to get the hang of it. Deciding what went into the legend and how to show it was the trickiest part of the lab.

Week 8: Dot Maps

The map above was created during the week 8 lab. I found it interesting working in excel and calculating my dot values. Each dot represented 4 housing units per square mile. I ended up using around 2200 dots in the map. Once I got the hang of creating the dots, it did not take long to do the map. I made the dots red so they would not get confused with the black borders of the counties. I thought the map looked interesting when just the dot layer were visible, but I left the other layers up to show why some areas of density existed.

Week 7: Proportional Circle Lab

The above map was created in the Week 7: Proportional Circle Lab. I enjoyed working with the data in excel. The process of calculating the circle size was interesting. I used the circle sizes in the legend because they represented even numbers and breaks in the data that would be easy for a map user to identify. I do feel I had room to make Europe larger in the map. I would change that if I had to do the exercise over. This did give me a change to practice overlapping circles. I placed a white ring around the circles and made them about 50% transparent so I could stack them. The larger circles were placed first on the bottom and the smaller circles on top. I used a symbol from the symbol library to indicate no data for countries with no data. It also allowed me to practice using groups and layers. Being able to edit all the circles at once was a huge help. I decided not to leave the country labels active because I feel they cluttered the map and took attention away from what the circles were communicating.

Week 6: Choropleth

The above maps were produced for the week 6 choropleth lab. They show the percentage change in population for the U.S. by state and census divisions for 1990-2000. I decided to round the numbers for each class. I thought this would be easier for a map user to read. I was not pleased with my Hawaii scale bar. I deleted part of it before I scaled the state thinking it would look better than a big bar. I then figured out how to scale down the numbers and bars without disturbing the length of the bars. If I could go back I would change that. I found the easiest way to change the states to grayscale was to calculate my classes first, then create the legend. Once I had the colors for the legend, I just clicked on each stated and hit the appropriate legend color with the eyedropper tool. The hardest part of the lab was dividing the data in excel. I found the best way was to give each state a division code then sort that way, as someone suggested in the discussions. I think this step had the most potential for human error. I had to double check this and indeed had to correct some errors.