Ethan Nauman
3/7/14
Lab 2 Blog Post
The goal for Lab 2 was to introduce us about how to download information and metadata from the internet and transform it onto a map. It may sound easy but there were quite a few steps that I had to fulfill allowing me to open up the data in ArcGIS, and also being able to map the data in the correct format. A few of the skills I was able to take away from this lab were: being able to download data and metadata from the internet and unzipping it, allowing me to access it and map it in Arcmap. Another skill that I learned was how to normalize the data for a map, this lets me change what information that I actually want to be displayed on the map. Instead of just mapping the population like I did for the first map, on the second map I was able to change the normalization allowing me to map any of the data I chose from the second set of data I choose, area and size of the counties. Also, I learned about the color scheme of the data. By changing the color scheme to qualitative this allowed me to map more then one set of numbers. It allowed me to show you different populations throughout the state in the first map and it allowed me to show different areas of the counties in the second map.
I am now going to walk you through how I was able to download information from the United States Census Bureau and how I was able to add the files to my maps. First I had to go to the website for the census bureau, the I had to figure out what information I wanted to look at based on our lab 2 manual, and for the second map I was allowed to download any information that I wanted to map out. The first map was population in the counties and the second was the size and area of the counties like I said earlier. After finding the data, I had to download it and unzip the files which would allow me to access them in excel. This part was key and took a little figuring out and hands on time to allow me to download and save the information to excel. By using excel, the information then is allowed to be used in Arcmap. Once I viewed the metadata and tabular data in excel I had to change it from a csv file to an excel file. The next step was to open Arcmap and view the attribute table for the data to make sure that it came over properly from excel. I could then exit out of the tables and download the WI counties to the two data frames that I would be working with. After uploading the counties, I then had to join each of the two data sets together. I could verify that it worked by after joining, I had to again open the attribute tables. After verifying that it worked I then had to change the symbology of the shape files allowing me display the variables that I downloaded, population and area and size of the counties. Upon completing and displaying the data that I choose, my map was close to finished. All I had left to do was insert a north arrow, scale bar, title, author, source, year the data was from, and legend. I could then mess around with the display of the data allowing my maps to take up most of the space provided for me, and the color schemes.
The results fell into the predictions that I thought would happen. For the first map on population of the counties, most of the population in Wisconsin is in the south eastern part of the state. In Wisconsin, most of the bigger cities are located in these regions from Green Bay down to Milwaukee and over to Madison. It is very easy to determine this by the color scheme that I incorporated on the map. My second map I chose to map the area and size of the counties. This also followed my prediction that most of the bigger counties would make up the northern part of the state were not as many people lived. Almost exactly the northern half was quite a bit bigger, except for two counties down by the border of Illinois. Using the color scheme I did on the second map it's even easier to tell the size and area of the counties compared to the population on the first map. The source of the map came from the United States Census Bureau's website. This information allowed me to make the maps I wanted and is quite up to date considering it was information from 2010. The only map that would change is the first map considering that it deals with population and population can change some over a few years.
I am overall happy with how the maps turned out and how the information is displayed. I believe it is quite easy to determine what I am trying to map and viewers of the information can determine the information by the different color schemes that I used. Below are my two maps on the information of population and area/ size of the counties.
The results fell into the predictions that I thought would happen. For the first map on population of the counties, most of the population in Wisconsin is in the south eastern part of the state. In Wisconsin, most of the bigger cities are located in these regions from Green Bay down to Milwaukee and over to Madison. It is very easy to determine this by the color scheme that I incorporated on the map. My second map I chose to map the area and size of the counties. This also followed my prediction that most of the bigger counties would make up the northern part of the state were not as many people lived. Almost exactly the northern half was quite a bit bigger, except for two counties down by the border of Illinois. Using the color scheme I did on the second map it's even easier to tell the size and area of the counties compared to the population on the first map. The source of the map came from the United States Census Bureau's website. This information allowed me to make the maps I wanted and is quite up to date considering it was information from 2010. The only map that would change is the first map considering that it deals with population and population can change some over a few years.
I am overall happy with how the maps turned out and how the information is displayed. I believe it is quite easy to determine what I am trying to map and viewers of the information can determine the information by the different color schemes that I used. Below are my two maps on the information of population and area/ size of the counties.
