Geog 301 – Classification Two
Written by Sterling Quinn, modified by Bob Hickey
In this lab you’ll put together many of your Pro and cartography skills gained this quarter to create a choropleth map of literacy rates in the country of Colombia.
Data
The literacy.shp file(s) is in the lab 12 subdirectory. Grab it (well, you should already have it....) and put it on your flash drive. It shows the number of people age 6 and over who can and cannot read in each of Colombia’s departments, as determined in the year 2014. This is the only dataset you will use in this exercise.
The dataset was obtained from Esri Colombia’s Open Data page. (Full metadata)
Making the map
Use the above dataset (the one you grabbed from the data drive, don't try to find something on the internet) to create an 8.5 x 11 inch choropleth map showing the story of literacy (or illiteracy, but make sure the reader is completely sure what you're mapping) in Colombia. The audience of this map is any world citizen interested in literacy, Colombia, or both. IGNORE the islands when making this map.
Your map will be graded on the following:
- Use an equal area projection tailored to Colombia. Using the skills you gained in Tissot’s Indicatrix lab, you must select an equal area projection for South America and then modify the central meridian and two standard parallels of your chosen projection so that they run through the country of Colombia in the most appropriate places.
- Normalize the data. You should show literacy (or illiteracy) as a percentage of the population, not a total number. Note, to be able to see a useful histogram of percent literate (or illiterate), you will need to create a new field and calculate this value. When you do this, make sure to change the data type from long to float (double click on the data type and then select from the pulldown)- you will need decimals, not integers.. You know from the last lab how to do this! But, create a field in your attribute table that is percent literate (or illiterate).
- Classify the data according to whatever way you feel most accurately describes the literacy (or illiteracy) situation in Colombia at present. The number of classes and the class break locations are up to you, but you must be able to justify your selections.
- Symbolize the data using an appropriate color scheme. Remember the impact of colors on how people interpret things.
- Label all the departments. Just use the automatic label placement tool for now: Juist right click on the layer you want to pull labels from and select labels. A window will pop up. Be sure to select which column you want to use as labels!
- Make a layout for your map and add a title, legend, scale, and any other marginalia information as appropriate. Your legend should not contain any items or characters that would distract from the purpose of the map. Get rid of all underscores, extra decimal places, the name of the data frame, etc. After you insert the legend, you can convert it to graphics to get greater control over the elements. Ignore the little islands to the NW (they don't need to be on your map).
Make this map of high enough quality that you would feel comfortable showing it to a potential employer during a job interview.
Preparing the deliverables
When you are done making your map, make sure you export the map as a .PDF, which can easily be printed. Then print a color copy of the map.
Deliverables
Answer the following on a typewritten sheet and attach it to your color map. Place both documents in the mailboxy thing on my office door. The lab is worth 4 points.
- Which projection did you use?
- Which central meridian and standard parallels did you apply to the projection in order to tailor it to Colombia?
- How did you determine the values to use in question 2 above?
- What process did you use to choose your class breaks and number of classes in order to best convey the literacy situation in Colombia?
- What other cartographic choices did you make in order to clearly convey the story of this map to its audience?