Methods:
Part 1: I was instructed to consult the U.S. Census Bureau website to obtain the data for this lab exercise. Through the advanced search feature on the Census website, I set the parameters for the search. I was instructed to use the 2010 SFI 100% Data under the topic menu of the options. Then I was instructed to select All Counties Within Wisconsin under the Geographies tab. This gave me access to the data from the 2010 Census that applied to all the counties with in the state of Wisconsin. Then I was instructed to select and download Total Population from the list of the data we had. Once I had the data downloaded, I opened the data set in Arc Catalog which opens in Excel. I had to change format the entire column with the population numbers in it from a text format to a numeric. This allows the numbers to be read correctly by Arc Map for calculation and mapping purposes.
Part 2: For this section I was instructed to download the map file for the state of Wisconsin. This is easily done through the U.S. Census website by clicking on the map tab and then clicking download. This extracts the map shapefile from the website for use in Arc Map.
Part 3: This step required me to bring in all the data that I had downloaded from the U.S. Census website into Arc Map. I imported the shapefile of Wisconsin that showed the state broken down by county. Then I imported the data set of the population that I downloaded and formatted from the U.S. Census website. I then joined the table from the population data set to the data set in the shapefile using the GEO#id, as these fields were the same in both data sets. In order to properly map the population I had to create another field to nominalize the data by. I used the field calculator in arc map to to calculate the area of each county.
Part 4: Step 4 required me to map the data that I had downloaded and imported in to Arc Map. In the symbology tab I chose Quantities and then Graduated Colors, to make a Choropleth map of the population. I had to pick my color representation of choice and my class structure. For this map I chose yellow to brownish/red color scheme and the number of people per square mile for my class structure.
Part 5: Using all of the same techniques as the previous steps I was instructed to choose my own variable to download and map for the state of Wisconsin on the county level. I created a new data frame layer in Arc Map to build this map. I chose to map the number of vacant houses per county. I chose to norminalize this data by the total number of houses and displayed it as a percent for each county. I chose to use an opposing color scheme for this map as it was going to be displayed side by side with my first map.
Part 6: After creating these two maps I had to create a layout that put both maps on one page for display purposes. I was also to project the map in a suitable projection for the area. I chose to project the map in the NAD 1983 Central Wisconsin State Plane projection to minimize the distortion and increase the accuracy of the map. Then in the layout view of Arc Map, I added a scale, north arrow, title, legend, neatline, background, and my name to the final design of the two maps.
Below is the final product of all the above sections.
