Texas is not New Mexico!

I was really impressed by this New Mexico Soap. New Mexico is a soap making company.  The photo above is of a product called ‘lather as you learn’ state shaped bar. They have soaps in the shapes of all the states. However, I still wonder why they make Texas shaped soap with a label of New Mexico on it!!

How the state got their boundaries?

Now that my both GIS classes are over this weekend was ‘assignments free’ after quite a while. I watched couple of movies, went for shopping, had delicious dinner, spent some time with my husband and played United States Map Puzzle. That’s right, played map puzzle for fun. Contrary to my initial thought it was quite a challenge to recognize the states from their shape. Of all the states, California, Texas, and Florida has easily recognizable shape.

 I wondered how all these states got their boundary. My search for my question gave me a book- How the States got their shape, by Mark Stein. Here is the book’s first introductory page.

Now I really want to know, why West Virginia has a finger creeping up the side of Pennsylvania and why Texas and California are so outsized?!

Second atlas page of final project of mine.

My second map for the final project is “Contribution of Pennsylvania to Pediatric Healthcare’. I wanted to use Network Analysis Method to show proximity of each health center but didn’t work out in the time constrain and available data.

I like to thank my husband at this point to help me get required data from the American Academy of Pediatrics and FREIDA. I used services and catchment provided by tertiary healthcare centers as the outcome. At first glance I thought it was such a disproportionate distribution of the healthcare in the state. But then my favorite census data came to the rescue!  After applying the healthcare catchment and pediatric population data for each county to the map, it became obvious that the tertiary healthcare system in Pennsylvania is strategically placed. More than 75% of total pediatric population is covered in 60miles proximity of one or other health center. The programs are CHIP, WIC and hospitals are CHOP puts Pennsylvania as a leader in pediatric healthcare.

One of the two final project map of mine.

Finally, I am done with all atlas pages of final project of my cartography class. Here is my first atlas page on ‘Urbanization in Pennsylvania’.



I am really thankful to Hershey Library for keeping those awesome books on history of Pennsylvania. I had more than my regular dose of reading the history while working on this. It was a challenge to present census data in useable format on the atlas. Gathering and managing data in ArcMap was most tedious job I found during working on it. This project gave me huge hands on experience with ESRI software and I got chance to know the history of Pennsylvania. My respect for Pennsylvania and its history has increased by a huge amount after working on this project.

Berkeley Pit In Butte, Montana

Berkeley Pit assignment was to exercise terrain analysis and 3D modeling in ArcScene. I had given to make Elevation map, Hillshade map, and Orthographic view of Berkeley Pit. This was the first project dealt with Digital Elevation Model.

Spatial Analyst tool is a great feature of ArcGIS. Playing with all 3D tools is fun and you get amazing results. Arcscene allows overlying layers and making it 3D. Sometime it gets buggy. The thing I always have problem with is draping the aerial images. I would love to have some suggestions or tips regarding that. But for now enjoy my poster!

Yellowstone National Park

I created this poster of Yellowstone National Park & Supervolcano showing relief features and few important location of the park. This project interested me a lot as in past I had been on some geographic field visits to similar geographical locations during my college years and it was very fascinating to me. I included the location and timeline of past eruption of volcano and general history of the area.

Finding the data was the real task in this project. Searching for authentic base map, digitizing park boundary and caldera rim, creating new feature class, etc made this project a challenge. In the end, I was very happy with the outcome. I hope you all agree!

  

Harrisburg Pub Crawl

Working on Harrisburg Pub Crawl project was very interesting. This was my first contact with any information about pub and alcohol!! Overall it was pretty simple project but I had to do more of base research and concept research for this. Though choosing the theme for the map was little tactic. For the path and the pub location I used one of the base maps from ArcMap. I ended up using beer mug as my theme for the project.

I tried to give more visual impact to the map rather than putting too much text information. To lighten the mood of the theme I used lots of cartoons while projecting the information. ‘

P.S: It was a good opportunity for me to learn about pubs and alcohol!! ;)

Study Abroad Poster

The very first assignment in cartography class was to make a flyer for collage’s study abroad program. It was specially to get hands on PowerPoint and Gimp (graphic software). But we had to add one map which should be created in ArcGIS.

(Map for Study Abroad Poster made in ArcMap.)

(Finished product-Flyer for HACC's study abroad program.)

This project taught that graphic skills are must needed talent for mapmaking. We learned to plan a layout, to balance page with elements, to conceder map purpose and audience, etc. It was good start and I enjoyed that project.

Mapping urban transition of Ahmedabad

Ahmedabad is the largest city in state Gujarat, India with a city population of about 4 million. It is the seventh largest city and eighth largest metropolitan area of the country. The video below shows the history of the development of the city from its foundation in 1411 AD to present day.

The video contains maps that are scaled models of spatial concepts of the city. Maps depict transition and process of urbanization in city. It also tells history of cartography and achievements in the branch in India. All the maps shown in video are truly admirable.