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.
No comments:
Post a Comment