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!

  

Economic Growth of The World.

Here is one of the video from ted.com showing excellent example of projections using maps and multimedia. I have bias against this one because it includes my home country ;)

Dose driving make you fat??

I always knew that this could be the reason!! but recently found this map-  Driving is why you are fat! The map shows statewise how people get to work everyday and what is state's obesity ranking. Ranking is done for 50 states plus District of Columbia.

A map analyst inside me couldn’t help noticing a weird ranking system that is #1 in obesity is the place with minimum obese. The other thing I bumped into is some of the states have high drive rank as well as high walk/bike rank (eg: AL, MS, LA, OK), wouldn’t the higher rank for walking and biking mean a lower rank for driving as ranks are given by percentage of total population of state. I even don’t like the dull boring color combination used in the map!


Still, it is a decent map even if the details aren’t completely logical. The idea of block style presentation of statistic is nice for the evenness. This way smaller size state can also be focused similarly. Although the relation between the obesity and mode of communication is very obscure, this kind of map can be made for obesity in relation to food consumed, average Income or general economy. However, this particular map gives good representation of the different modes of transportations.