I just couldn't stay away

Here I am back again at this GIS thing.  This weeks lab was fairly straight forward because I have worked with ArcGIS before so it made the orientation easier.  I did have trouble following the directions for the process summary through because they were not very straight forward.  This map is a basic map of the worlds population in 2007 with the cities populated.

I'm looking forward to getting back into doing some more GIS and hoping that this certificate may afford me some opportunites in the future that I may not have had previously.  

FINAL!

Whew, oh this final.  This final's objective was to create from scratch a map of the United States showing both the participation rate and the mean score for either the SAT or the ACT.  I chose to use the SAT because that is what I took however, the data for both was provided.  We were given quite a bit of time to create both the map and our summary.  The summary was not too bad to complete because it was fairly straight forward.  The map on the other hand was more difficult because I felt that I had to reign in my "want to go nuts" in order to create a more professional and polished product.  I can say with complete certainty that this project really utilized the skills that I have learned over this semester in many ways such as projections, data classification, stylistic effects, proportional symbol creation and I'm sure there are some others that I'm forgetting.  I chose to use the choropleth and proportional symbol mapping methods because I felt that both of those were suited to displaying the data required.  I needed to think about many things in the creation of this map such as figure ground distinction, using the usable map space and placement of items.  To create this map I used a combination of ArcMap and Adobe Illustrator.  First I imported the data from a previous lab then chaged the projection because I felt that the Lambert projection had a little more geographical layout than that Alberts.  Once I changed the projection I then imported the table that I created in Excel by cutting out the part of the SAT data PDF that I needed.  This allowed me to directly import the participation rates to create the cloropleth map.  I used ColorBrewer to help me decide on a color scheme to use.  Once I had decided I chose one at random in ArcMap then applied the legend, north arrow, labels and scale bar.  I exported this to Adobe Illustrator and imported the color scheme that I downloaded from ColorBrewer.  Once in AI I needed to edit all of the layers because when you import there are a lot of paths that you don't really need.  After deleting these I was ready to go.  I then changed the color scheme, arranged the map as well as resizing it making sure to include the scale bar because otherwise the scale would be off.  I created the symbols by importing it from the internet and creating a clipping path around the circle itself.  Once the symbol was created I then had to scale them for the data.  I did this by taking the cube root of the SAT mean score which I calculated by adding up the scores then dividing by 3 to get the mean.  Once the cube root was found I then manually scaled them based upon the largest symbol size I wanted.  Once this was done I then placed them on the map along with the state labels.  This is what I ended up with:

Lab 12

Lab 12s objective was to convert our Dot Density map from last lab to a KML file for import into Google Earth.  Google Earth is a very powerful program that contains quite a bit of data about various places on earth.  It allows you to zoom in on specific place as well as create tours of places in 3D that can include quite a bit of information about that specific place.  For me this was an easy lab because I have used Google Earth before and am famililar with the navigation and operation of this program.  The one thing I did learn about Google Earth is that some of the data is inputed by LiDAR imagry which is a very accurate satillite type.  This type of imagry contains a large amount of detail as seen below with the picture of the St. Pete Times Forum, the area located in downtown Tampa.  The fact that you can read the sign on the front as well as see the ads diplayed on the area is absolutely amazing to me.

Lab 11

Oh lab 11 how difficult you were for me!  I really struggled with this lab.  Not with the material, creating a dot density map was fairly straight forward.  Especially when you create one from scratch 5 different times!  Let me tell you, that was quite frustrating!  However, I finally got the map to work, kinda.  What I eventually had to do was take a screenshot of the map with my masking working and then I turned in the .JPG of the broken map.  I tried pretty much everything to get the masking to work but unfortunately it wouldn't work.

Anyway the purpose of this lab was to create a dot density map of south Florida's population.  We were given quite a bit of freedom in the actual creation of the map which was good because it made us use good color schemes in the creation.  We used two layers in this map the Surface Water and the Urban Land.  The best way to create this map was to place dots only in the Urban Land areas.  I chose the colors to emphasize the dots as opposed to the surface water or the interstate system.  The bottom picture is the map with the masking turned on.  This should give you an idea of where the dot densities should have fallen in the actual map.  You can see that the main concentrations are Tampa and Miami which makes sense because those areas are some of the larger cities in Florida.

Lab 10

In this lab the objective was to use proportional flow lines to portray the immigration of people into the United States in 2007.  The usage of the flow lines was pretty basic once you got the hang of using the pen tool which was much easier after watching the Adobe video on the website.  Before that I really had no clue what I was doing.  Also we were introduced into stylizing objects by using the 3-D effects, drop shadow, and inner glow.  I think that drop shadow was my favorite, hence why I used it on all of my flow lines.  I am becoming much more comfortable in using the basic AI tools to do the tasks that we need to do for each map, such as the neatline.  One of the most frustrating parts of this lab for me was changing the color scheme for the U.S. map.  For some reason every time I selected the states and changed the color it would just make the borders go away.  It took me about four times to realize that I had the stroke selected.  Whoops!  After that the rest of the lab went smooth besides playing with the effects.  Playing with the effects was time consuming but fun because it really allowed me to further explore the power of AI.  Below is my final product.

Lab 9

This lab was all about isarithmic mapping. Isarithmic mapping is mostly known in its for as a contour map. It is mainly used when the data set shows a smooth transition between phenomena. This lab we mapped the average annual rainfall for Washington state over the past 30 years, from 1980-2010. We used two different types of maps, the continuous-tone and the hypsometric tint. The continuous tone map uses a gradient color scale to show the change from low to high concentration. The hypsometric tint map, on the other hand, uses a stepping scale much like a chloropleth map. Also the hypsometric tint map uses data classification to break up the phenomena into classes. I prefered this map because I felt that it was easier to see the distinct changes between concentrations. Overall, I liked this lab because the instructions were very laid out and easy to follow. The one thing that I did not like is how ArcMap has the contour lines set up. You have to manually insert the data points at which you want your contours to appear. I feel that with the automation that ArcMap has built into it there should be an option to allow it to figure out the best points for your contours.

Lab 8

In Lab 8 we were introduced into proportional mapping.  This type of map uses a geometric or symbol shape to show the volume of an attribute.  This lab looked at European wine consumption in 2010.  The first map we used only ArcMap to create.  Mine did not turn out all that pretty but the instructions were to leave the default settings.  This caused me to end up with multiple country labels.  This first lab was the one that gave me the most trouble because first the spreadsheet that we needed to import wouldn't allow me to calculate the root of the wine consumption.  We needed to calculate that so we could show proportionally how much each country consumed.  Also, I kept trying to CTRL+Z to undo the action that I just did.  That only erased my layers quite a few times.  It was unbeliveably frustrating for me because I would have to redo the wine root as well as re-add the shape file.  I kept the "hollow" circles because I felt that with the color contrast it was easy to discern the size.  The map below is what I ended up with.

The legend gave me trouble as well.  For some reason I could not get more symbols on the legend to show the actual number proportions.  It was very frustrating.  I am not sure if I was doing something wrong or if I needed to export it into AI to finish that part to make it where I wanted it.  But, the lab said to leave it so I followed directions, this time.

The below map is the second part of the lab.  This map was zoomed in with ArcMap and then immediately exported to AI.  The rest of it was finished in AI.  I actually felt much more comfortable with AI than ArcMap.  This was strange for me because in the beginning it was the opposite way around.  Today I was actually able to get AI to do what I wanted.  For example, the black border, I would have never attempted to do because it hid the north arrow and the scale bar.  It took me a second to figure out the scale bar because at first I was only able to get the numbers to be white.  After a while I realized that I needed to change both of the colors to white and then it worked!  I am becoming much more comfortable with AI and I like that because of how powerful of a tool it is.