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:

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.

  1. Which projection did you use?
  2. Which central meridian and standard parallels did you apply to the projection in order to tailor it to Colombia?
  3. How did you determine the values to use in question 2 above?
  4. What process did you use to choose your class breaks and number of classes in order to best convey the literacy situation in Colombia?
  5. What other cartographic choices did you make in order to clearly convey the story of this map to its audience?