North Carolina American Ancestry Choropleth

Intro:
This is a map showing the location of North Carolina residents reporting American ancestry and the various ways data can be reported and classified in a choropleth map.

Methods:
I began with an outline of North Carolina, it's counties, and some data regarding amount of people reporting American ancestry per county in North Carolina.  I already had the absolute data but had to calculate the percentage data based on total population, which was relatively easy in Microsoft Excel.  Then, I had to establish where the class breaks would be in the data.  To calculate this for quintile classification, all I had to do was take the highest value in the dataset, and divide it by five; this gave me the amount each interval would contain.  From there I chose the colors of the maps based off of a sequential set on http://colorbrewer2.org/.  Seeing as how I am not intimately familiar with counties in North Carolina, it took me a while to put my data onto the map as I had to make sure I was putting the right color onto the right county over and over again.

Results:
The main purpose of this map is to show how much influence a cartographer can have over the appearance of data.  It's clear from this map that how data is represented can have a huge effect on how the viewer sees it.  The appearance of the data can vary vastly based on the type of interval classification method used.

Reference Map of Portage, WI

Intro:
For this map I was tasked with taking creating a reference map of a location.  I chose to map my hometown, Portage, WI.

Methods:
I began by taking an aerial image of my hometown from ArcMap and exporting it into AdobeIllustrator.  Then, I proceeded to trace out some of the more important elements of my hometown which I wanted to be featured in my map.  These elements included, significant bodies of water, major streets, and major structures.  The most difficult part of this map was adjusting to the fact that not everything could be done perfectly.  The aerial map wasn't perfectly clear at some points and I had to adjust some of the features and labels to insure they fit well with the other map elements.

Results:
The end result is a very simple reference map of Portage, WI which could possibly be used to highlight the city to tourists or other visitors.

GPS: Grocery Store Access

Into:
This exercise's purpose was to teach me how to take gather data on a GPS handheld receiver and drop it into ArcGIS to create a map out of it.

Methods:
We had freedom with this exercise to choose what we wanted to map, and I was curious as to most peoples' everday access to food in the city of Eau Claire.  So I decided to do some research as to where the major supermarkets in Eau Claire are and drove around marking waypoints in my GPS as I got to each one.  I only used major supermarkets with an inventory of a wide variety of items, which in Eau Claire include:  Gordy's County Market, Target, ALDI, Walmart, Festival Foods, and MEGA.  I did not include small specialty markets, serving a special clientele, such as Just Local Foods.  I then took the census tracts from the ESRI database that the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire provides students and put them on the map as well to help me show population levels.

Results:
As can be seen by the map, most of the major supermarkets lie in the outskirts of the city.  This leads to a mini food desert being created in the central area of the city.  I'd like to explore more into this issue and see what's being done about this potential food desert in Eau Claire.

Map Projections of South America

Intro:
The main purpose of this map was to learn how much different map projections can change the appearance of a map.  It is difficult to take a spherical object, such as the earth, and project it onto a flat surface, such as a map.  In order to do this many map projections were created and this exercise aided me in being introduced to them.

Methods:
I went into ArcGIS and began with a view of South America.  I took this image and projected it to several of the major projections in use today (Albers Equal Area and Equidistant Conic are two examples).  After each projection I would export the projection into AdobeIllustrator.  After I had all of the projection in AdobeIllustrator I arranged them on top of one another.  After that it was just a matter of making sure each different projection could be clearly seen and was labeled in the legend.  I've also provided a brief description of projections alongside the images of the continent.

Results:
This exercise taught me how different projections are skewed in certain ways, and the best projections to use in order to minimize certain errors.  I also learned how to bring maps into AdobeIllustrator from ArcGIS.

Africa Reference Map

Intro:
This was the first map that I created in AdobeIllustrator.  This is a reference map of the country of Africa displaying political boundaries and some physical features such as rivers.  As I was relatively new to AdobeIllustrator this map took a while to design and perfect the way I wanted it.

Methods:
I took a basemap of Africa and began shading in the different colors.  These specific colors were chosen using http://colorbrewer2.com/, which is a great resource that I learned I would be using time and again for my future maps.  I made sure to keep the amount of diferent colors of the countries down to five to help insure the map stayed readable.  The most difficult part of this exercise (other than this was the first time I'd really ever used AdobeIllustrator extensively) was getting all of the labels to fit well, especially withing small countries such as Rwanda.

Results: 
The results are a suitable reference map for Africa that clearly shows political boundaries and important physical features of the continent, which includes all of the five basic essentials of map design.