Lab 1: Super Tuesday

With the 2008 primary season having been underway since 2007, this week's assignment is to make a simple map in Flash of either the Republican or Democratic primaries leading up to Super Tuesday. I chose to do the Republican primaries, and I've also chosen to show the states that each candidate has already won. I think it turned out pretty well for my first time using Flash.

New York Times' 2006 Midterm Elections Map

I was greatly impressed when I came across this 2006 Midterm Elections map by the New York Times. It's Flash-based, meaning that I can't imbed more than a screenshot of one of its maps, but the screenshot gives the general idea.

Essentially, it is a collection of maps about the midterm elections, divided into several categories. The most basic maps are the maps of the Democratic and Republican gains and holds in the Senate, House, and governor races. The color-coding system makes it easy to see at a glance how many states each party held and won, and it is clear right away that the Democrats made great gains in that election. The states can be shown with their standard political boundaries or they can be distorted by population, showing which states have the most influence in Congress and how those states are divided between Democratic and Republican representation.

The maps make good use of rollovers, as hovering the mouse on various features brings up additional statistics, such as voting percentages. The interface is clean and easy to understand, and it communicates the results without cluttering the interface with meaningless content. The map succeeds at its primary goal and does so in an attractive fashion.

Linkage

I've added a few useful links for cartographers and GIS users on the right in addition to the standard class links.

• ESRI is the company that makes ArcGIS, and if you're not familiar with ArcGIS, you will be soon.


• The National Atlas is a useful resource for anyone interested in maps of the United States, but it's especially useful for the GIS data it provides free of charge, including information on boundaries, climate, transportation, geology, agriculture, hydrology, and more.


• The USDA Geospatial Data Gateway is a terrific place to go for free, recent aerial imagery of the United States. The only real downside is that the imagery can be rather large (hundreds of megabytes) and imagery requests often take a little while to be processed (from minutes to hours) but the products are well worth the trouble. Also, the site uses Java so it may not work behind some corporate firewalls. Otherwise, though, it's great.


• "Google Maps," as Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell put it, "is the best. True dat. Double True!" Sure, Yahoo! Maps and MapQuest can be used to find the dopest route, but I prefer Google Maps' interface and the way that you can drag routes it suggests to reroute to various stops or onto specific roads. It also overlays traffic conditions for many metropolitan areas.


• Topozone is a good place to go to look at USGS Quad maps. Actually downloading the maps for use in a GIS isn't free, but the site's interface is good for navigating to the desired site and viewing it at several different scales.

For Starters...

(click the image for larger version)

I made this map on behalf of my brother for our father for Christmas 2007. My brother lived in Arlington until this summer when he and his wife moved out to California. Our father and he drove his car across the country and later, my brother asked me if I knew of any good websites or businesses to go to for a custom map to commemorate the trip. I did a little bit of searching on the web but didn't find anything, so eventually I just had the idea to do it myself since that would be a lot cheaper and I'd have full control over the final product.

I did the preliminary work in ArcGIS, assembling the data on the places they stayed overnight and the locations of their major stops. The state boundaries and the nice relief image that makes up the background I found on the National Atlas site. After much consternation and effort, I settled on the World Equidistant Cylindrical projection, mainly because it stretched the lower 48 states enough to match the 24"x36" dimensions I'd chosen for the poster without leaving much space around the sides. Once I had the rudiments of the map laid out and its data components assembled and placed in ArcGIS, I exported the map to Adobe Illustrator to do the real artistic work.

My brother had the idea of drawing the route depicting their travels from the start with callouts for their prominent stops. Fortunately, it was pretty easy to get good imagery/logos for most of the stops (the stop in Virginia is my own house. I wasn't going to include it but he wanted it on there.) The route itself is derived from highway data. He didn't recall the exact highways they'd gone on but I figured what I had was close enough. If I were doing it again I might smooth the roads if I thought it would look better. The color scheme changed a few times during the process, and I think the final scheme works really well with the USA theme and is easy to read.

The pictures on the lower left and right are digital photos they took on the trip, and they were easy to add in Illustrator. The title block graphic is just an American flag graphic I pulled off the web, stretched slightly and cropped and then made transparent to dull the colors to make the text readable. The bottom tip of Texas is cut off but I can live with that. I searched Google for methods of making "flaming" text for the 114 degrees indicator in Arizona, though I can't find the exact site I used. I think the flaming text turned out really well.

The whole project took about...25-30 hours, including all the revising and brainstorming. I was able to plot it on glossy paper at the highest quality, and the poster looked great. I got a nice wooden frame for it and we presented it to our dad for Christmas. He was pretty moved by it and everyone was impressed with how it turned out, including my brother, since it was the first time he'd seen it in person (I'd been emailing him PDFs regularly.) I'm really pleased with how the map turned out since I hadn't done a large, artsy map before.