Saturday, November 15, 2008

Lab 10

This was my favorite lab so far - not only because it was our last but also because I felt like I learned some new techniques and tried them here; like the neat line drop shadow and some other things. This is a bivariate map showing two sets of data on one map.

Monday, November 10, 2008

Lab 9

This is a color version of Lab 7. The color versions, both hard and soft copy, display better than the grey scale version from Lab 7. To contrast the hard and soft copies, the printed version shows greater color changes. Specifically the two darkest colors on the hard copy are contrast more than when posted in the blog. However the two lightest colors contrast more with eachother than in the digital version. The lightest color on the digital version almost appears white whereas it is more tan on the hard copy. The only difference I would make, now that I can see the hard copy, is I would make the lightest color a little darker so as to not appear so white when seen on the computer screen.

Saturday, November 1, 2008

Lab 8

This was a lab on proportional symbols. We pretended that the state of Maryland asked us to create a grey-scale map (we haven't had our color lesson yet) depicting the relative density of census data for each county. In a proportional symbol map, a symbol (cow) is scaled to various sizes to depict the relative magnitude of some value. Proportional symbol maps scale symbols to continuous sizes. Graduated symbol maps only scale symbols to discrete sizes.

Graduated Symbol Example

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Lab 7






Lab 7: Grayscale Choropleth Maps of the 50 States
Comparison of Natural Breaks and Equal Interval


The map classed by equal interval gives an impression at first glance of a split between northern and southern states and shows a clumping of southeastern states. The natural breaks classified map appears more diverse. If I were to really use Natural Breaks I would have split it into many more categories but was limited to five for eye ease (especially since we were told to create the map in grayscale).



Choropleth Map

This is an example of a choropleth map courtesy of http://personal.uncc.edu/lagaro/cwg/color/Choro5-SingleHueGood.gif

Friday, October 10, 2008

Lab 6

This is a Dot Map. The idea was that the Census Bureau was interested in creating a map depicting the distribution of Veterans in West Virginia. I was provided a data file that didn't indicate a year the data was collected so I left it off of the map. According to our lab assignment and text book, Dot maps are used to provide a visual impression of relative density.

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Dot Map

Commercial Wireless Antennas in the USA
Courtesy: http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cybergeography/atlas/wireless.html

Lab 5

This is the lab on creating boundary files for Illustrator and Making a Map. I found it helpful to only export one map from ArcMap instead of two and then flatten it in Adobe Illustrator so you're only moving one map around instead of two.

Saturday, September 27, 2008

Friday, September 26, 2008

To The Moon!

This map shows artificial objects on the surface of the Moon. The map does not include smaller objects like the golf balls from Alan Shepard's lunar driving practice during Apollo 14 or the Fallen Astronaut statuette left by the crew of Apollo 15.


Saturday, September 20, 2008

Lab 3

Mollweide Graticule


Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Clean Coal?

This is a link to maps related to Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining.
http://www.ohvec.org/issues/mountaintop_removal/maps/index.html

Saturday, September 13, 2008

Lab 2

Illustration of Sphere, Geoid, Ellipsoid, and Natural Surface

Thursday, September 4, 2008

Links

Our first assignment is to post five links to geography related websites. The first two were chosen by the professor. The last three were my choice.

http://geog310.blogspot.com/ is our class website (Introduction to Digital Cartography). It has our professor's picture and a link to Census 2000 maps showing U.S. population and diversity maps.

http://www.gmu.edu/departments/geog is George Mason's Department of Geography website. It has a link for geography employers.

http://www.geoeye.com/ is the company for which I work. It is listed on the previous link as a geography employer in the private sector. GeoEye is currently hiring Geospatial Analysts in Dulles VA.

http://www.stopmountaintopremoval.org/ is a site dedicated to the stop of mountaintop removal. This is a cause to which I contribute and did a project on in my "Conservation of Natural Resources" class. People should be educated on the toxicity and destructive nature of "clean coal".

http://gos2.geodata.gov/wps/portal/gos is the geodata.gov website for U.S. Maps and data which contains federal, state and local geographic data. This site has a lot of special interest pages for real world geography.