Hopefully Passing Class...

final.map

2008-12-09T20:38:00.001-08:00

So, this is it. The end of a semester, the end of statistically-induced headaches (well, one can only hope), and quite possibly the end of this blog. Some things about my final map are still bothering me, but with the simplicity that I'd like to maintain on this map, if I keep messing with it I'm doing more harm than good at this point. So this is it - my final map.

And here are some links to accompany it! The salt and pepper, the seasoning to this bare-bones, meat and potatoes type map.

eIraq @ Twitter: A twitter that tells you about things going down in Iraq. Why a twitter page? Well, I just got myself a twitter tonight (click here if you're interested in following me), so I'm in a twitter state of mind. How ridiculous does that sound?

Basic info and history on Iraq: self-explanatory.

Capone N Noreaga - Iraq (See the World) @ YouTube: a song off of one of my favorite albums, that just so happens to be called Iraq. That's relevant...right? RIGHT?! Warning: vulgar language ensues. Why would two rappers call a song Iraq? Well, random trivia, Noreaga is from the Lefrak City housing development, in Corona, Queens, NYC, which is also known as "Iraq". See? This is educational. I could even map it for you.

Recent AP news story on Iraq War: interesting, and via Google news.

War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq: need some reading material to pass the time during winter break? Check out this book for sale through Barnes & Noble.

just.in.case

2008-12-03T23:21:00.001-08:00

posting this so that in case the .ai file that I e-mailed myself to show proof of my, er...proof, fails, then I have a backup that is sure to work.

Haven't done much yet, I know, but I much prefer stressing myself out closer to deadlines. Pressure is such an adrenaline rush, don't you agree?

lab.10.bivariate

2008-11-16T22:05:00.000-08:00

Dang. Look at that. I made that! Yeah, I'm sure it's not perfect but it's the first lab I've done where Illustrator hasn't given me a ridiculous amount of issues. And dangit, it looks pretty fresh. I messed around with transparency a bit in this lab and said to hell with gradients, because frankly I'm sick of them. Transparency is sooo much cooler.

This was VERY time consuming though, I will say that much. It has officially taken up my weekend. Between sorting through data (and I had to convert my population stats to percentages as they weren't given in that format) and then mapping sooooo many counties (I vote for a state with less counties next time!!!, or at least VA where I'm semi-familiar with where they are), this really took a long time.

Map of the week:
This is a cool map because it uses choropleth to map one dataset, and a 3-dimensional aspect to map another. Makes for a visually interesting map, yet it's still pretty easy to read. It's clean, sharp, to the point, and yet creative at the same time.

lab.9.color

2008-11-08T16:36:00.000-08:00

Ah, the first dose of color. And that's all that this map got. After working on it for a while, I remembered why everything was where it was - because I couldn't get it to move anywhere else. Had I been successful, I would have moved Alaska and Hawaii around a bit and just handled that a little more efficiently. Illustrator really gives me problems. And I'm computer literate, I swear. It can't just be me.

...for the record, I enjoy how this map looked in greyscale more than I do in color.

Anyway, my printed copy turned out looking a lot like what the digital version did...colors were pretty much the same except the printed copy looked a little brighter and I felt like I preferred it to the copy you see on your screen. The text was blurrier on my printed copy than it was on the digital copy, though. Oh well, you win some, you lose some.

Map of the week:

(click to see the whole image)
This map is so cool looking - I just wish it had a title. It has to do with interstate transportation of wine, but that's about all I could figure out. I LOVE the colors, embellishments, lines...it's just gorgeous. But please...please give me a title so I can figure out what it all means!

lab.8.proportional.symbol

2008-11-08T15:25:00.000-08:00

Hm. What to say? Not much really. My houses look more like factories because I left out that stereotypical triangular roof that is ever-so-popular in the simplistic style of house drawing. I was just having trouble getting it to work. I do think that the symbols stand out from the basemap well, though. That's a plus. Not bad, not great. Just glad it's done.

Map of the week (even though I'm not sure we needed one?)

This maps two variables - whether or not a country is landlocked, and it's population (as exemplified by the graudated symbols).

Really not much to say this week...didn't enjoy this map as much as the dot map, but found it easier than the choropleth.

bay.area.benefit.show

2008-11-01T19:25:00.000-07:00

Something unrelated to class, but that means a lot to me. In case you didn't know, I essentially live and breathe hip hop, and I absolutely love when hip hop meets positivity and politics.

If you know anybody in the San Francisco Bay Area, please forward this their way. It will be a great show (yes, I'm confident enough in this to guarantee it), and the money will go towards building an orphanage/school/clinic in Afghanistan that will serve Afghan children orphaned by the war. Thanks. If you have any questions about the event, feel free to ask me in class.

More maps to come, and I hope everybody had a safe Halloween!

lab.7.choropleth

2008-10-29T17:01:00.001-07:00

I miss the dots. This lab gave me lots of problems. Now I'm tired, mentally drained, and SO over this. There goes my dot "high" of sorts.

I still have trouble with adding gradient. And you know what? I like it without it anyway. So take THAT, cranky Illustrator!

Brief statement about above maps: I feel like neither the natural breaks or equal interval produced strikingly different results. The only data intervals that had easily visible differences were the lowest two classes of percentages, which had the most data within them anyway. The outliers, like Nevada and Arizona, remained distinctively recognizable in both maps.

Conclusion from maps: a lot of new houses are being built in Arizona and Nevada. I HAVE heard that the housing market in Vegas has been growing for a while now, and it's really becoming more and more residential...so this goes along with what I've heard.

map of the week:

It's definitely a colorful choropleth map...but I wouldn't call it very effective. It's hard to tell what data represents the highest and lowest amount...it's pretty at first, but hard to comprehend. It's also almost too happy looking for such a depressing subject - HIV and AIDS doesn't make me think pink and yellow, nahmean?

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get away from maps. ASAP.

a.geographic.halloween

2008-10-25T19:24:00.001-07:00

Picture not taken by me. Original picture here.

This is so cool, and so ridiculously nerdy.

lab.6.dot.maps

2008-10-19T15:39:00.000-07:00

.............DOTS!!!!!!!

Due to being out of town, I missed a lot of the dot map discussion in class, I think. But I did what I could. I realize the flaws of this map - I made my dots so tiny that it was dang near impossible to have any type of coalescing going on to emphasize the density of the data. By the time I realized that the data distribution wasn't going to appear as clearly as I had wished it would, I was way too far in to re-do the whole thing from scratch. Hopefully my realization of this issue will gain me some points *wink wink*. I won't even get into the peculiarity that happened when I tried to print this thing (I got more of a dots and dashes map than a dot map...I promise they're all dots though!). Moral of the story - next time I'll make my dots a little bit bigger. Just a little. And I'd probably use more dots, too. For the record, if I was REALLY making this for the Census Bureau, I'd totally start over and make it perfect, but since I'm not getting paid for this, I gave it all the time I could before I had to focus on things that I actually AM getting paid for.

Surprisingly, I kind of liked doing this map. It gave me time to listen to some good D.C. area music (as much as I complain about Wale these days, his "Mixtape About Nothing" was actually pretty good) while having "fun" moving dots around on a screen. This is probably the most enjoyable blog to date - maybe even just because I didn't encounter any huge problems (except I DID try to add a gradient and failed miserably, as is evidenced by the lack of one altogether.)

MAP OF THE WEEK!
I spent three or four days of the past week in various parts of New York City (mostly Harlem), so why not have a dot map that has to do with the Big Apple? Indeed.

This dot map is mapping a whopping two variables at once. It's a lot more interesting than it sounds. It's mapping the people who make less than 35k per year that also have commute times of more than one hour. Fascinating. I always wanted to move to NYC, but this isn't exactly encouraging. Neither is the swiss cheese-like condition of their roads. Want to see it full size?
http://www.gothamgazette.com/graphics/2008/04/DotDensityLowIncomeCommute.jpg

I *heart* the dots. More dots, please!

To quote Wale..."Out til next time. One."

Lab.5.the.DMV

2008-10-06T19:15:00.000-07:00

Another week, another frustrating lab. Such is life as a Geography major that wishes she wasn't. And man, that exam was kind of tricky.

Anyway, on to business. Above you will find my image for Lab 5. I constantly refer to the Virginia/DC/Maryland area as the DMV. Don't know if that's just a "youth" sort of term, but hey, now this map becomes an "Urban Dictionary" of sorts because it sort of deciphers what the DMV might mean (it's not always the Department of Motor Vehicles!). For some reason the county and state lines were thicker than I wanted, and of course I couldn't figure out how to make them thinner. So it kind of made labeling the map rather tricky. Oh well, you win some, you lose some. Looking back, I should have labeled the District of Columbia as "D.C.", or changed the title to say "District of Columbia" to maintain consistency and reduce confusion for anybody not from around here that would be looking at this map, but I really don't have time to go back and fix it now. I figure the intended audience (this class) knows that the terms are interchangable and D.C. is nothing more than an acronym anyway.

Figuring out the scale was a little tough, too. I ended up going to Wikipedia to find out how long Virginia was, and turning on the ruler in Illustrator to see how many inches long the Virginia on my map was, and going from there. Therefore the scale is a serious approximation, seeing as how my math left me with a very very very long number. I like rounding things.

Oh, and uh...well, labeling the states was proving a little too frustrating in Illustrator, so I got creative and found my own way to do it. I'll just keep that little secret to myself. All that matters is that it's labeled, right? I think improvisation is a great skill to have. *wink*

I guess I need a map of the week, too? Hm. Here's a "Visitor's Map" of D.C., filled with symbols, images, and information.

Is it bad that posts on here are easier to edit in HTML than in the regular editor? Peculiar. Click on the image above to see the full-size map.

lab.4.typography

2008-09-30T20:28:00.001-07:00

I have a feeling that this image won't show up too big, and I'm not sure how to fix that because I didn't mess with the size of the image at all. It looks fine in Illustrator...but it's things like this that remind me why I would never ever considering being a graphic design major or anything like that. There is not one visually artistic bone in my body. The finished product of this lab should exemplify that. I know it's rough, I really do, but I put a lot of time into this one and this is the best I could muster up. And frankly, I didn't have too much determination for perfection after the frustrations of today's exam and the fact that today is Eid - so I've had to watch and hear about my family eating yummy pastries and meals all day while I'm busting my butt at work, school, and doing this lab while I actually have a minute to do so.

Here's to hoping that the next labs won't be so time intensive. My free time is in about as good shape as our stock market right now.

I feel like all I do is complain on these blog posts. I promise, I'm not usually like this. The content of this class is just seriously not for me.

On a brighter note, I saw a Geography-related story pertaining to two of my passions - hip hop and the District of Columbia (which is the place of my birth). National Geographic is hosting an "All Roads Film Festival", and an artist named K'Naan that hails from Somalia (currently by way of Toronto) will be performing for free at 9pm on Friday.

MAP OF THE WEEK:

This is hard to see, but if you click here you can see an image of the map where you can zoom in very far and see all the text and font action going on in this bad boy of a cartographic product! The reasoning for this map? Aside from being LOADED with text, it's a National Geographic map. And they're getting props for me this week for showing that they're down with some hip hop. Word. Make sure you peep the usage of both serif and sans serif fonts going on, as well as the various insets, illustrations, and supplemental information that the text on the map contains. It almost makes medieval England interesting to me. Almost. Oh, and you can purchase a mounted copy of it for the pocket-change price of only $159.

SO SICK OF ILLUSTRATOR!!!!!!!!!

Until next week...

lab.3 - the.mollweide.graticule

2008-09-21T16:16:00.001-07:00

Wow. I really do despise being in the lab on a Sunday just to do this, but I frankly don't have the time during the week. GMU's campus is pretty dead on Sundays, and oddly enough there are a bunch of little kids at the Aquatic and Fitness center. Since I'm the only one in the lab at this point, the lights keep going off because I'm not moving much, and I suppose they're hooked up to a motion sensor. So here I sit, in the dark, in the armpit of the campus that is the old Robinson building, alone and posting a blog. Goodness I love college!

But seriously, this lab was not without its difficulties. For one thing, the instructions for how to make the lines of longitude were probably more complex than they needed to be. I found that if you select the ellipse tool, hold the alt key, and then click once directly at the point you want the equator and prime meridian to meet, that you can specify the exact width and height of the ellipse you want to make. So all I had to do was use the conversion given to us (72 points = 1 inch), note that the width was 10 inches, giving me a total of 720 points, etc. etc. (not trying to give away the answers to someone who hasn't done it yet....) and I could figure out exactly how wide I needed the next ellipse to be. No clicking and dragging...just entering numbers, and *poof*! You have your ellipses.

I couldn't get the 'distance' concept to work in order to draw my lines of latitude, so I got creative. Rather than use inches, I used pixels, and went to good ol' Google to figure out the conversion from inches to pixels so that I could convert the values given to us in the instructions into pixels. Looking back, I didn't really need to do this, but at the time I thought I did. So I centered the rulers, then realized that if you use the line segment tool and click once, you can specify the exact length you want the line segment to be, and what angle you want it to go. So, starting at 0 degrees, I specified a vertical height in pixels (converted from the inches given in the instructions), which showed me the height above or below the equator that my line of latitude needed to be. Then I clicked once and drew a line perpendicular to that one, and resized it to fit the graticule.

I also realized that increasing the width of the lines made it more obvious to the eye exactly how distorted the projection gets - the thicker the line, the more intense the color at the poles, which is the most distorted area. So I chose to make my lines 2pt.

I tried and tried but could not get my title above the graticule, so it lies below. I kind of like being different, although I suppose in this case it will work against me. I tried. Seriously.

I dislike maps more than I ever have before and I don't see this changing any time soon. At this point, sitting in this room on a Sunday, I'm reminded why I should have changed majors while the time was right.

lab 2: my.first.adobe.illustrator.image

2008-09-16T19:13:00.000-07:00

So what if it's black and white, slightly hard to read unless your nose is practically touching it, and seems to have an oddly shaped growth coming out of the Southern region? It's my first project that I've ever done in Adobe Illustrator. And I'm darn proud of myself.

And since I'm so darn proud and therefore feeling ambitious, here's a random map to look at for this week! I did a random image search in Google, so I'm not quite sure where it is (I believe Australia), but I really like the colors they chose to use and the fact that it uses lots of different techniques to differentiate between data - the two that stuck out the most to me were the different hues of blue and the varying widths of the purple-pink-ish lines.

The original image can be found here.

Now if you'll excuse me, the weather has been gorgeous lately, and I have been staring at this blog for far too long. Until next week...

why.these.links.?

2008-09-09T18:32:00.001-07:00

I won't front. Little to no creativity went into picking the links that you currently find to the right hand side of the page, but that shouldn't take away from their importance!

I chose the class blog and the GMU Department of Geography because the instructions in the assignement told me to. Nothing more, nothing less.

Things get slightly more unpredictable with the other 3/5 of the required linkage. Gamma Theta Upsilon is an international honor society based in geography. I'm a member of the Eta Omicron chapter here at GMU.

Adobe Illustrator is something everyone should be familiar with already, since it will be the program we'll use in class to create our maps. I wasn't as familiar with it as I hoped to be, so I linked the site so that I, or anybody else in class, can easily find information about the program.

Hopefully this class will spark an interest in cartography for some people, and in case it does, I linked to cartography related books available for purchase via amazon.com. The syllabus for Geog 310 is making me think that I won't have much time for pleasure reading during this semester, but perhaps during winter break some of these books will provide some reading material for some of you.

And to start off the mapping fun, here's the map that I have probably referenced more than any other in the course of my life...it shouldn't take much to figure out what it is!