Sunday, March 5, 2017

Cartographic Skills Module 7: Choropleth and Proportional Symbol Mapping

In this assignment for Cartographic Skills, we tackled two types of thematic maps, choropleth and proportional symbol, by creating a single map of Europe showing population density (as a choropleth map) and per capita wine consumption (as a proportional symbol overlay).

The map was created in ArcMap using provided data and finished using Adobe Illustrator (that was a LOT of symbols and labels to adjust manually--yikes). I chose natural breaks classification for both population density and wine consumption, because I thought it visualized the data best, showing the overall variation while also capturing outliers at the high end of each range (for example, the Netherlands for population density, and Vatican City for wine consumption, which ended up being a class by itself because it's so much higher than everything else). ArcMap classifies the data automatically based on an algorithm that looks for existing gaps to separate classes. I also chose to use graduated symbols for the wine consumption layer rather than proportional symbols--same concept, but slightly different presentation. With graduated symbols the data is divided into classes for which the whole range of data is assigned one symbol size, and that size isn't directly related to the data value. I thought that in this case it was easier to distinguish the symbols this way (that's also why I used only four classes--I found if I used five, it was hard to tell the difference between the middle symbols anyway, which sort of defeats the purpose) and easier to understand what the symbols represent.

Anyway, the map:

Some general trends you might notice are that Western Europe tends to have higher levels of wine consumption, while Scandinavia and much of Eastern Europe seem to drink less wine. The colder parts of the continent, predictably, tend to have lower population densities. I don't see any very obvious correlation between population density and wine consumption, though that could be a function of the way the data ended up being represented here, but it's still an interesting map.

No comments:

Post a Comment