Cartographic Skills Final Project

Whew!  That's done.  Our final project pulled in many of the skills we learned over the course of this semester.  Our project was to create a bivariate map, one map displaying two thematic datasets over one geographic region, for the Washington Post to use to help explain their article on high school seniors and college entrance scores.

We were provided with a document with the participation rates and the the mean scores for the three portions of the SATs.  We had to add the three scores to come up with the mean composite score for each state and add that, the participation rate, and the state name to a table that could be imported to our map.  We were also directed to a site where we could find an appropriate basemap to start from.  This map had no projection so our first task in ArcMap was to give it a suitable projection.

Because I was dealing with a large land mass that ran generally from east to west I chose to go with Albers Equal Area Conic.  Then it was a simple matter of adding the table to my map and joining it with the attribute table of the U.S. map dataset.  To symbolize my first dataset, the mean composite SAT scores, I chose to go with a Choropleth map classified with the Quantile method and 5 classes.  This gave me a nice, even distribution of the data with enough classes to represent the ranges well, but still allow for a nice distinction between the ranges with my color scheme.  For that I chose to go with a sequential range of blues with the lightest representing the lowest range of scores, and the darkest, the highest.

With the Choropleth map as a base I decided to go with a Graduated Symbol method for my second dataset.  I chose a dark blue color to go along with the color scheme of the basemap, and circles for my symbol.  I used an Equal Interval classification method with 5 classes, the smallest for the lowest participation rate and the largest for the highest.

I think the map does a fair job displaying the two sets of data for a comparison of the SAT scores and the participation rate.  I added two insets to show Alaska and Hawaii separately.  This allowed me to zoom in nice and tight on the contiguous states to make better use of my paper space.  I waited to add my state labels until I moved over to Adobe Illustrator.  Once I was there adding them was quick and easy.  I was very impressed with myself for being able to correctly locate all the states without having to look any of them up.  I guess I'm easily impressed.  I added a medium-light blue background to the map because I didn't want it to contrast or stand out and detract attention from my map, but the color blended just a little too well so I added a drop shadow to the contiguous states.  I felt that added all the distinction I needed to separate the map from the background in such a way that it stood out.  I then added my title, subtext and map information and was done.

This has been a very interesting course.  This project helped me realize I had learned more than I realized and I was quite please most of my reference to previous lessons was just for verification.  I'm still a bit intimidated by AI, but I think my skills there have improved considerable since my first go.  I'm looking forward to moving on to the next set of classes and seeing what else is in store for me.