my own maps

 This picture is showing the percetage in each county in the United States. it is clear that on the there percentage is large ate the east coast and the west coast, especially in California and around New York. This may due to the imigration at last century. In the area of California, some places have about 40% Asian, which shows that the Asian are the domaining race in this area. The graph is really true, as we can see that there is popular Chinatown, Korean town and Little Tokyo in Los Angeles county.

This graph shows the Black People percentage in  each county. We can see that the southeast of the States is the dominated. Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Missisippi, Louisana, all these states used to be the places where there are slaves. In comparison, the northen areas like Minnesoda seem to have just a few amount of Black people.



From this picture, I don't know what does it actually show. But we can see from the other side, which shows that, native Americans and White people are the majority in the northeast area. People in those area are conservative and traditional.

This one shows that, in the States, people are centrated in the coast. On the west coast, California and Washington seem to be nice place where people would like tol live. On the east coast, people would rather live in New York, Massahusetts and Florida. It is easy to understand the distribute because cosmopolitan cities are all at the coast. Most of the people all like to live in such big cities in which it is convinient to work and live. Comparitively, we can see that, almost no people live in the center. I believe that the center part is the area for the native.

Actually, what we can infer ffrom the map matches the reality well. We can see that, as the States is a multi-racial country, different racial people lived in this land. The map accurately shows the distribution as Asians mostly live in California and Black people live in southeast area. The maps does not only show the peference of each race, but also shows some natural disciplines, such as the economy of the cities at the coast are easily developed for the convienience of the trade by ship.

Finally, as the end of the quarter to learn GIS, I really feel useful of this software. First of all, the map it shows is acurate, beautiful, clear, and amazing. This tool is much more intellegent that other drawing tools. Second, this tool is helpful when the users want to analyze something or describe something. Third, the form that it changes the data to a vivid graph make it convient to present and use. Last, this tool is not solo, because it can actually connect with other softwares like excel or word, in order to transform data to different formation. I really like it.

Week 7 assignment: Map of Yellow Stone National Park

This week, we can choose our own map from the Internet. At first, I thought that I can choose a place which I was familiar with. So I decided to look at the area of Massachusetts. However, as a place where I used to live and a place near the sea, Boston area seems has no fantastic landscape but ocean. Then I decided to change to a place where there are mountains and rivers. As far as I went to search at the northwest of the States, I found that Yellow Stone National Park is a great place with interesting landscape. Naturally, there are mountains and rivers, which mean that it should project a really good 3D map. There is a basin at the west, a few mountains at the north, and a shallow valley all crossing the map from the west to the east. The special landscape is presented well by the color of the map, as the color changes frequently. The changes show that there is almost no plain area. I really want to go there for adventure and exploring the nature.

Map Projection

This week, the assignment I did is creating different map projection. This assignment is much easier than the one last week, and I just finished it less than 2 hours. All in all, I would like to consider this assignment as a further step on ArcGIS. From the assignment, I learned a new function about the software—new projection design.

At first, I had a problem on the cities choosing part. I cannot quickly select the cities and dragged them out of the contribution table. I tried to select the cities at the table at first and clicked the right button. I wanted to find a way to export these two single elements in the table, but failed at last. TA helped us by teaching us that we can use the ‘selection’ and make the two elements a new layer.

Then the other problem I faced is about the projection choosing. I don’t know which one is equal distance projection or which is conformal projection. I had been stuck for a while. I had searched online and asked classmates about it. 

Finally I can recognize them correctly. It was really simple to create the map and insert scale bars, arrows. At last I changed the colors and the symbols of cities in order to make it clear to recognize.

By these three weeks getting touch with the ArcGIS, I found it interesting and would like to excavate more about it. Take and simple example, by the assignment this week, I saw what the really world is like. As we always saw the regular map which is the so-called world map, we can hardly imagine that Antarctic is such big place, and that the total land in the earth is in just a small proportion. GIS has increased our knowledge and I really enjoy it.