Module 10 - Isopleth Maps

The displayed map was created as part of the University of West Florida Online GIS Certification program class, Cartographic Skills, (GIS 3015/L) for the Week 10 lab exercise: Isopleth Maps. The map was designed using Adobe Illustrator (CS4).



The map was created by manually interpolating points for the contour line between various data points that were overlaid on the map and then hidden when the final map was produced. For some points, I eyeballed it when, for example, the contour point was about halfway between the points. At other times I used a calculator and ruler to figure out a proportional close approximation.

The contours were drawn in CS4 using the Pen tool then smoothed out using the smooth tool which really was the workhorse tool in making the map because it allowed me to get nicely-smoothed continuous contour lines. So the process was Pen tool - click-a-point, click-a-point then Smooth tool - smooth the curve, smooth the curve, smooth the curve, until the contour looked like the end result. Actually the process was pretty fun.

Finally, the question of whether to fill in the space between the contours came up. I looked at various labor intensive ways of doing so, even going so far as to color the first two contours in the upper right part of the map. However, I did not like the way they looked compared to how the map looks without the shading which allowed me to concentrate the effect of figure ground by using a gray fill to frame the state map. When I darkened that fill slightly, I could really see the contour lines stand out. My big concern was what to do with the empty space but as solutions I shortened up the bottom white area below the neatline and then placed my legend info in the triangular area in the Northeast quadrant of the map. In the end I am quite satisfied with the map.

Module 9: Flow Maps

The displayed map was created as part of the University of West Florida Online GIS Certification program class, Cartographic Skills, (GIS 3015/L) for the Week 9 lab exercise: Flow Maps. The map was generated using ESRI ArcGIS - ArcMap and then exported to Adobe Illustrator (CS4) for editing and thematic elements.



How to describe the Flow Mapping experience ... to paraphrase from the words of Sheldon Cooper from the TV show, The Big Bang Theory, whilst he was paraphrasing Khan from the movie, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, in reference to the actor Will Wheaton .... it tasked me.

I started this map on Tuesday and am finishing it on Sunday, I did not work on it every day but spent a considerable amount of time trying to deal with the particulars of showing the flows in the way I wanted to present them. I had worked out a sketch on Tuesday for the theme and was very happy with it. However, it involved centering the United States within the map. In Arc I used the suggested projection after looking at a couple of others because I thought I could work with it, but when I got to Illustrator, I had lots of problems making things look the way I wanted. First to center the U.S. required cutting Asia in half and then grouping all the elements in Asia that needed to be moved. That task alone was several hours worth of work because there were so many individual objects and long moments were spent just waiting for the objects to be moved up the layer panel so they could be grouped. I got better toward the end, turning off the new layer so objects disappeared and sub-grouping objects in the original layer to try to shorten the list, but it would seem that there has got to be an easier way to do what I wanted and I'll seek advice from the instructor, Trisha, on a better method.

I also felt the map would look better if I colored individual countries in a region with a different shade of a particular color, rather then having one uniform color for the whole region. Shades allow the user to keep the whole region as a unit in mind while at the same time hinting that the data does come from individual countries after all. Doing so was not too hard but again, because there were so many objects, it was a time consuming task, especially trying to decide which shade to U.S. In the end I'm fairly happy with the way it looks, but not sure it was worth all the effort.

Once I got the U.S. centered, I wanted to expand it in a way that was thematically pleasing and made the U.S. the focal point of the map but did not want to distort the general map layout much to preserve the sense of spacial distance that people would travel to permanently move to the U.S. Again this proved to be more difficult then I'd expected, but I am somewhat happy with the result. I had my wife look at the map and she did not immediately focus on the fact that the U.S. was out of scale nor felt if detracted from the map, so I think that thematic idea worked.

Lastly, I did not want to bother with a legend on this map because there did not seem to be enough legend worthy information. I felt it'd be possible to incorporate the immigration data within each flow line. This also gave me a chance to play with placing text on a path, something I had not worked with in the previous typography lab. Again, it was difficult to get everything the way I wanted - drawing the lines, placing and sizing the text, centering the text on the line. I had to draw the line, place, adjust and center the text, then add the point size for the line and the arrow head, then adjust as needed. In the end I am very pleased with how this part of the map turned out and once I learned the steps was able to add each flow-line without incident.

I am pleased with what I finally achieved because the map does work thematically.

Week 8 Dot Distribution Maps

The displayed map was created as part of the University of West Florida Online GIS Certification program class, Cartographic Skills, (GIS 3015/L) for the Week 8 lab exercise: Dot Maps. The map was created using Adobe Illustrator to add the dots to a preloaded map of Florida counties.



Maybe spring break got me a little off my game, but the lab seemed very confusing to me, particularly the issue of whether to use dots that represent a raw data unit or a density unit. I used the density unit after following class discussions as a means to try to adhere to the original instructions. Adding dots was a time consuming process though not actually that difficult.

Most of the dots were added dot-by-dot because I tried to place dots relative to the way the actual population might be distributed. For example, dots were clustered around large cities such as Orlando and Tallahassee then outlier dots would be placed in locations of other smaller towns in the county. In counties with lower population densities, a dot would be placed proximate to where each town was located and additional dots would be dispersed within proximity to whichever towns may have a larger population. Geographic feature layers such as marsh and water were used to limit the placement dots to suitable housing areas and a geographically weighted approach was used when placing dots in a county adjacent to a more densely populated one. For dot size I chose a size of 0.75 point which seemed to allow coalescing in the densest county, Pinellas, but was still easily distinguishable in counties with lower densities.

It was very helpful to use the filtering feature in Excel to select each county as I worked on it since the Excel table was in alphabetical order. In general, after adding all the dots for Pinellas and setting my dot size and dot value, I worked the map from Northwest to Southeast going county by county. Wikipedia was found to be very helpful for the task because it was hard to see some of the county borders and I had to adjust several of the border labels as well. Each county can be looked up in Wikipedia simply by searching for it and each county entry has an inset map of Florida with the county highlighted. I really didn't have to use the layering and grouping features much for the lab, though the compass and scale bar were grouped as objects to make them easier to move and adjust. The scaling feature really helped a lot as I had not known how to scale mathematically prior to the lab and was trying to use the scaling tool, a dicey proposition at times.