Geo Leah

  In this week's lab, we created a map of annual precipitation averages in Washington with hypsometric tints and contours. The weather and elevation data used to create this map is a 30-year climatological average from the period 1981-2010, and that dataset comes from the PRISM Group at Oregon State University and was published by the US Department of Agriculture. In my map, I included an explanation of the PRISM model that was used to interpolate annual precipitation averages for each pixel in the state of Washington. I set the values for the contours manually according to the guidelines in the lab instructions, and I used the standard color scheme for precipitation maps. It was nice to make a really colorful map after weeks of following the traditional cartographic principle of avoiding rainbow colors! I chose a dark basemap to create a strong figure-ground relationship with the colorful map. We also explored continuous tone symbology in the lab, but I think this map looks a lot ...

For this week's lab, we made a choropleth map of population densities for European countries, with proportional or graduated symbols for wine consumption per capita in 2012. For my map, I chose to represent population density with five classes divided by natural breaks, and I represented wine consumption as proportional circles with grape icons. This lab was frustrating because of technological issues, most notably ArcGIS Pro's inability to complete the labeling function. I'm not sure why the processing speed was so slow that it was unable to label Europe's countries despite trying on multiple occasions and different wi-fi networks, but I wasted quite a bit of time hoping the labels would show up eventually before finally resorting to manually labeling each country. Because of all the technological issues, my map isn't as polished as I'd like. It also took about an hour for the layout to export, and when it did, it looked like this: I have no idea what went wron...

For this week's lab, we compared four different classification methods and two different measurements of the senior population from the 2010 census in Miami-Dade County. For the first map, I compared the natural breaks, quantile, equal interval, and standard deviation classification methods for the percentage of seniors in the population of each census tract. The equal interval method creates classes that all have the same range in their values. The number of observations will vary depending on the data distribution. This results in some classes with only a few or zero observations and some classes with many observations, and the presence of outliers can easily conceal clusters of observations or other variations in the data within each class. The quantile method creates classes that all have the same number of observations. The values in each class will vary depending on the data distribution. This results in a nice balance of colors on the map, since each class is represented t...

For this week's lab, we explored principles of cartographic design and Gestalt principles, which we used to make a map of public schools in Washington, D.C.'s Ward 7. Specifically, we focused on visual hierarchy, contrast, figure-ground relationship, and balance in our maps.  For the schools, I based the symbology on unique values from the Facility Usage (elementary, middle, or high school) of each school in Ward 7 and varied both the color and the size of the symbol for each of these categories. In the main map, the colors of the streets got darker from the light orange Ward 7 streets to the maroon interstates and US highways. The state highways, US highways, and interstates were 2 point lines, and the major streets and Ward 7 streets were 1 point. In the DC inset, the colors of the streets are the same, but all the streets shown are 1 point so as to not distract from the focus on the inset, which is Ward 7. I used an SQL query (NAME = 'Benning' Or NAME = 'Mayfair...