Population of South America

In this map series, I decided to map the population by country of South America. By doing this, I not only represented the Population by millions of each country, but I also decided to add a new field on the attribute table to represent the Population Density (Population per Square Mile). All the data was taken from the ArcGIS Database found on this computers. I worked with the "World" folder and decided to use the Country02 shapefile. These data is represented with the South America Lambert Conformal Conic Projection.

For the first map I used a simple Natural Breaks Classification with the gradual colors simbology. With Graduated colors, colors change according to the values of each country's population, using a color ramp with darker colors representing higher numeric values. This displays the Population by million of each South American Country. As we can see, Brazil has far more population with more than 151 million people compare with the small countries of Guyana and Suriname which have less than 1 million. I chose this classification methos since it works well with data that is not evenly distributed such as this one.

For the second map, I mapped the Population Density by square mile using graduated colors with a color ramped display. With this, each country is assigned a color depending on their classification and for this I used the natural breaks class (for the same reason as above). As we can see in this map, even though Brazil is the most populated Country, it isn't the most dense since it has a big area. With this map, we noticed that the most densely populated country in South America is Colombia (which is the second most populated one).

Finally, for the third map I used a Proportioned Dot classification to represent again the Population Density per square mile. In this display the data is cleanly represented by a single dot which varies in size depending on the density of the population. This representation is good for it shows different sized dots depending on the density, however it can be difficult to distinguish the different size dots since they are similar as well as to truly know what the actual density is. This display is better to give a glance of the data graphically but not explain it in detail.

Results of the 2008 US President Elections

My purpose to improve this map was to make it more clear and descriptive.
I decided to show the number of Total Electoral Collegiate Votes by state in the 2008 Elections, using the data that I found on the Project Vote Smart website (web address given on the foot line of the map), and adding it to new fields in the attribute Table. Then, I chose to label the number of these votes with every official state abbreviation. Moreover, I gave this State Abbreviation ID to every one of the 50 states, including the smaller ones on the East Coast and Hawaii. Also, I intended to differentiate the political parties of each state, by not only showing the Democratic/Republican states, but showing as well which of these states were leaning more towards a specific party.
On the design style, I preferred to use colors and fonts that would contrast better with each other, so they would highlight the differences intended.
By adding the total votes of each state, we get to the conclusion that Barack Obama is the winner of the 2008 U.S. Presidential Elections with 365 Electoral votes, against the 173 that John McCain won.

Census 2000 Population Patterns in The U.S.

About the maps: The purpose of these three maps is to represent the percentage population of three different races as described by the U.S. Census 2000. Each maps show the trends of Whites, African American and Asian population (respectively) by county. In doing this maps series, I used the North America Lambert Conformal Conic Projection, which preserves angular relations and which shows less distortion for the Continental United States. Also, since I am working with percentages, I used the Natural Breaks (Jenks) classification method, using 5 classes to find groupings and patterns in the data and reducing the number of decimals to one for better clarity. Furthermore, I used the graduated colors symbology to better represent and differentiate the patterns of these populations by percentage.

What does the map describe? With the graduated colors we can clearly see a definite pattern for each race alone. For example, we noticed that the vast majority of White people (90.1-99.7%). represented by the darker green color, live mainly towards the northern parts of the country, with even more emphasis on the north central and north-eastern counties of the U.S. . On the other hand, we can see that the majority of the African American population represented in dark purple (43.4-86.5%) is concentrated in the south-eastern counties of the United States, in states such as Missouri, Georgia and Alabama. Then, we see a trend of migration (5.5-16.3%) towards the northern counties and towards the west (mainly in Southern California). Last but not least, there was a clear pattern for the Asian Population which is more predominant (14-30.8%) towards the western states, as seen in dark brown in California and Washington or in the East Coast's counties, which reminds us of a clear immigration patterns towards New York in the beginning of the 20th century and California in the later years.

Note: Regarding the data, there was some "null data" in some of the central states, which could mean that a very little or zero percent of the population didn't declare themselves as "blacks" or Asians on the 2000 Census.

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