Final Project

So here is the final project for this class! As the title suggests, I mapped USDA certified organic livestock in the United States. The data is from 2005, the most recent year it was collected.

This map is a bivariate map where two groups were mapped; beef and poultry. You can see how most of the southern states in SE have very little certified livestock, in fact most of them have none at all. The same applies to SW part of the country, not including California. There is definitely a concentration of organic livestock in California and the Pacific Northwest, Texas and around the Great Lakes. States such as North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Kansas have large numbers of organic poultry but not that much organic beef production.

The map was more difficult to make than I had imagined. The bivariate color scheme was tricky and the data was very scattered having many extremely low values and on the other hand some very high values. The USDA logo could only be found online with a white box around it so I had to draw it myself. The type isn't the exact same used in the official logo but it is close enough.

Final Lab

So this was the final lab. I had some problems with Illustrator, for some reason the stuff I did in CS2 in the geography lab wouldn't work with my CS version. Couldn't select anything from the imported file.. So, I had to do the whole lab twice! Luckily I had my data ready but it still took a looong time. I think this lab turned out the best of all labs, I like the colors (not like the last disaster lab) and overall the map looks better. Sorry that this is a day late!!

Color!!

Finally a color map!! I think the colors look ok, though the printed version seems a bit sharper in quality. I would probably pick another background though, the text (numbers) is difficult to read with a bright red background.

Proportional Symbol Map

Missing California this week.. So here's a proportional symbol map which I found here.

Moo Moo!!

Choropleth map

This was an intersting assignment. It was difficult to make the map visually pleasing but it turned out okay. I didn't want to add greytone inside the neatline, I think it looks better with white background.

Irish in West Virginia

This was a fun but time consuming lab. The orientation of the dots could be better but overall I'm pretty happy with it.

Dots

This is an interesting dot density map downloaded from here. 

Counties of Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia

Clear typography

I liked the typography used in this map of the Antarctica. It's very sharp and easy to read.

Lab 4: Typography

I loved this lab! Lots of detailed work and it didn't turn out perfect but it was so much fun. :-D Some of the letters are a bit crooked but I'm pretty happy with the final map. Does someone actually get to do this stuff for a living?

Mollweide Graticule

Lab #3 was about drawing a Mollweide projection. Not too difficult to do although required some simple math to determine the grid size. Scale is 1:157,776,200 (i.e. 1 inch on the map represents 157,776,200 inches in real life).

Avebury stone circles

This week's map is a bit different, a local map of a stone circle in the U.K. Pretty neat! The map was downloaded from here.

Lab#2

Map of SW Finland, Aland etc. from 1751

I chose this map as my "map of the week" because I'm fascinated with old maps. It's interesting to think how much work went into mapmaking back then (this one is 250+ years old). In this map the shape of the part of Finland shown isn't really correct but the islands off Turku coast and Aland are very detailed. On most modern maps you cannot see the islands in this detail.

 

Three geography links

Google Earth is a wonderful tool for exploring Earth. You can see areas in detail and zoom in quite close to pretty much anywhere, this free program guarantees hours upon hours of educational fun. Google Earth works on the Mac too, yay!

GNIS which is short for Geographic Names Information System, is great for looking up data on different locations, names and other information like elevation. Just type in a name of a place (ie. Fairfax) and you get numerous results. You can define your search narrowing down the results as well. It is interesting to see that there are many places in the United States with the same name and you can find lots of places not found in a regular map.

Measurement conversion factors is an easy stop for all the assignments that require you to convert from the english system to the metric system and so on. The web site is very simple and nothing fancy but includes lots of information.