Final Project - O'ahu with the Forzano Ohana

Ten Maps I Like From GGS310

"Favorite Five" - Maps Made By Classmates:

From John: Great topic and old-time feel to this map.  Original artwork and interesting to look at.

From Nicole: I like the artistic touches that she uses in her maps, the flower clip art paired with the title and outline of her legend box tie everything together.

From Danielle: I really like her color scheme and layout.  I think this is a very well done map.

From Thomas:  I like how this map is clean and the icon and legend box both work with the theme.

From Jared: I like how he pulled in the elements of strip mining to the entire map, background included.  Even being black and white, there is a lot to look at and it is not "boring."

"Favorite Five" - Maps Found By Classmates on the Web:

From Danielle: Interesting way of using isolines to show skin tone across the globe.

From Danielle: I like the prism effect on this bi-variate map.  With this projection, the states behind the ones with the highest confirmed human cases are not obscured.

From Cory:  This is interesting with the different texts.  The colors look muted, almost like denim. 

From Cory: The bright blue really makes the data stand out well against the black background.

From Bryan: Liked the concise trail map with artistic flair.  Nice color scheme and artwork.

Lab 10: Bivariate Map

A map showing Super Typhoon Haiyan superimposed over the continental United States has gone viral. It's all wrong.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115554/haiyan-isnt-large-united-states

Here's the image, supposedly (actually?) created by the Red Cross:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/12/typhoon-haiyan-map_n_4256302.html
In the images below, provided by the University of Wisconsin's Space Science and Engineering Center, Haiyan and Katrina are pictured side by side. The image on the left shows what it would've looked like had Haiyan landed near the Gulf of Mexico, while the one on the right is an actual image of Hurricane Katrina:

Last week, in the hope of providing some perspective to those outside the Philippines as to the massive scale of this disaster, Derek Medlin, an editor at CBS-affiliate WRAL.com, tweeted a photograph of what it would've looked like if the typhoon had made landfall near North Carolina:

Bi-variate Map Example from Web

"The view below highlights the current issue with Tableau dual axis mapping visualizations--dots are stores, and filled areas are customer demand. Customer demand exists in areas (postal codes) where there are no stores, but these don't show up because they do not have a corresponding joined data point.  Want to show all stores and all area demand in one view.  This is the most requested view in our company and I would love to run it from Tableau."

 http://community.tableausoftware.com/ideas/1492

Lab 9: West Virginia Dot Density Map

Final Project Thoughts

I will be mapping the lighthouses of Florida.  I chose this subject because next year for our anniversary, my husband and I are taking a trip to Florida and we enjoy touring lighthouses.  We have several books that are not current and that do not have maps.  I also see a need for this map because even though I have found several sites on-line regarding lighthouses with maps, I have yet to find one map that encompasses the entire state, with all lighthouses listed.  The audience for this map will primarily be my family, but I intend to model it after tourist-style maps. 

The scope of my map will be the coastal areas, with just the base map of Florida needed.  The data that I have found so far is from the U.S. Coast Guard and the Florida Lighthouse Association, all current this year.  I will attempt to include all lighthouses and reef and shoal lights, indicating whether the lights are still active, and most importantly, if they are open to the public.  Some grounds are open to the public, but the lights themselves cannot be toured, so I will specify that open to the public is meaning that you can actually climb the tower to the lens room.  There are 35 lighthouses in Florida at this time, with 29 remaining active and 11 offering tours. 

After uploading the basemap, I will spend a lot of time on getting the colors and fonts to match the old-time feel of the map.  I love the color scheme from the map on the attached website, but will incorporate some of my own ideas…  I will find a mimetic icon and decide how to show the data of active/decommissioned and open/closed to the public.  I’m not sure yet on the best way to do this…

I expect my main challenge will be placing all of the information on the map in a fresh, aesthetically pleasing way.  The link at the bottom is to a map from www.pensacolalighthouse.org .  I feel it is the “best looking” map that I have found, but it doesn’t include all of the information that I need.  I like the “old” feel to it, which brings to mind the era in which lighthouses played such an important part.  I would like to improve this map, with maybe this color scheme.  The other 4 maps included again do not show all of the lighthouses and are lacking in aesthetic appeal to me.  

Partial Map of Florida Lighthouses


 

Dot Density Map Example from Web

This looks like they blended the choropleth style with the dot-density style. 

Lab 8: VA Smerg Concentrations

Isoline Map Found On-Line

This population map uses isolines to represent the distribution of human beings around the Earth.
 Retrieved from http://www.kidsgeo.com/geography-for-kids/0034-isolines.php

Lab 7: Proportional Symbol Map

Lab 6: Color Choropleth Map

I really like how color makes these maps stand out.  I stayed with my Equal Interval style and it was hard to read the gray-scale, but the blues and greens here really highlight how the central, southern states in America have a higher percentage of teen pregnancy.  On screen, the colors here seem to be much more vibrant than on the printed version.  The dark blue in the highest-percentile group seems to have changed the most, and stands out a lot more clearly on-line.  The mid-range colors look the closest to the print version.  If I were to change anything, it would be to make the darker hues deeper to stand out more on the paper printout.  Also trying different color printers would be interesting, to see if that changes the color tints.

Use of Color in a Map

Percent of Teen Pregnancies in the United States

Choropleth Map Example

D.C., Maryland, and Virginia with County Borders

Lab 3: Typography

This Mollweide projection is a pseudo cylindrical equal-area projection with straight and elliptical meridians; it was first presented by Carl Mollweide in 1805.

Type Used Creatively and Effectively

The first map is from a page in an atlas for the blind where the author must choose type to be efficient and straightforward.  The state bird map I thought was simple and pretty, but the type was hard to read when it came to the actual names of birds.

Van der Grinten Map Projection

http://www.progonos.com/furuti/MapProj/Normal/ProjOth/projOth.html
"Van der Grinten's proposals are examples of conventional designs, derived not from a perspective process but from an arbitrary geometric construction on the map plane. They are neither equal-area nor conformal (despite a superficial resemblance to projections by Lagrange, Eisenlohr and August), but intended to "look right", in the sense of conveying the notion of a round Earth (in this aspect, they resemble earlier globular projections) without departing too much from Mercator's familiar shapes."

Lab 1: Illustration of Sphere, Geoid, Ellipsoid, and Natural Surface

Interactive Map of Greenhill Crossing Community

I chose the following map because it is of my neighborhood.  When we were house hunting last year, we used many similar maps through longandfoster.com.
http://www.greenhillcrossing.com/sub_category_list.asp?category=5&title=Map