1) Chapter 5 mucked about with symbolization. After working through the chapter, make a new view of the Africa map (and by new, close down that map and start all over again by adding data, not opening a mxd). Rebuild it in black and white. Map the elephants, zebras, and giraffes and any two other themes. Assume all you have is a black and white printer. Make a quick layout, add a title, legend, neatline, your name, scale, etc. and print it out. Work a bit to ensure it is readable in black and white. Repeat - if it looks terrible, you will lose points! When you do this, start a COMPLETELY new layout - don't use the existing map file.
Onto chapter 6
2) Classification. Start out reading, especially the info on page 131. If
these classification schemes don't make sense after my lecture in lab and
this text, head onto google and search. There's a ton of info out there. Now,
work through this chapter. After this, your first task, play around with the
Jenks classifier (2000 pop data for Africa). Change the number of classes
(from 3-5-7-9) and see how the class breaks change with each different map(especially
look at the histograms). Give me a short writeup describing the changes and how they change your interpretation/understanding of population in Africa. Print two of these maps (make the layouts nice, all the usual stuff).
However, I would expect you to pick the two maps that show the most different/interesting
stories.. For more information regarding classifiers, see your text or just
do an online search.
3) Next task - make a series of 4 maps - 1 each using the different classification methods (natural breaks, equal interval, quantiles, and standard deviation). Use the same africa shapefile and the same number of classes (your choice in the 4-7 range) for every map. However, do NOT use the pop2000 or pop1996 data. There are plenty of other fields you can use. Provide a 1 page writeup which describes how the your interpretation/understanding changes with the different classification methods. The objective here is to see how maps change with different classifications (but the same data).
and a side note - to get stuff like the histogram out of arcgis and into, say, word: hit the print screen button, open Word, and paste. Basically, the print screen command captures an image of the screen. You can then resize/etc within Word. Below is an example of a printscreen pasted into this document.
so - final output - 7 maps (black and white - africa, 2x change # of classes, and 4x classification methods), the written part of question 2, and a 1 page description of your classification choices (from question 3).