Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Choropleth Map (Diverging color scheme)



Projection Selection: I selected "Albers Equal Area Conic Projection" as I feel that this projection displays the areas accurately and is best for respresenting the east -west extent of US.

Color Scheme: It is a Choropleth map. Data provided is quantitative in nature. I have considered population change as a bipolar in nature since it has negative values indicating population losses in some areas and also positive values in other areas showing population gains. There are areas where there is very negligible or no population change considering it as a dividing point shown by lighter (neutral) color in the middle. So being bipolar in nature I felt that diverging color scheme would be appropriate for this map representation.

Choropleth Map (Gray scale)



For the Choropleth map shown in the left, Gray scale color scheme is used. Also, as mentioned in the lab directions, 5 equal interval classes are considered for this map, where class interval for each class is determined by dividing the range of the data by the number of classes (here it is 5) and upper limit is computed by adding class interval to the lowest value in the data. Class limits are then specified (shown in the legend).