COLOR | Classification, chloropleth, and population change

This week consisted of playing around with different classifications for data such as Natural breaks, equal interval, and quantile. Each of these can be effective in their own regard depending on what the data represents and how it is valued. The natural break method appears to create groupings of classes that are clustered based on their average deviation from the mean. Here we have small classes such as 12% and 23% with high counts of features, 70 and 76. While the next intervals up are 38% and 61% with 41 and 42 features. Finally the last 98% with only 25 features. Equal interval in my opinion appears to do just that, it takes equal parts from the whole and splits them up that way. I think this option will allow you to emphasize on the overall value and amount. Quantile appears to be broken up by the number of features opposed to the percentage of Hispanic individuals. You can see in this example that the class breaks almost ascend 20% at a time; 21%, 40%, 59%, 78%, 98%.  This quantile method of class breaks will put equal number of features into classes. In this example it looks like there is a pattern of uniformity, 50,52,50,52,50. I imagine that if there is on uneven number or composite number then the quantile method will distribute those outlier equally. In particular, I think the best classification system to use would be equal interval. Next would be quantile and lastly I would use natural breaks. I feel natural breaks is not very simply to understand for the general audience that is viewing the map, there would be a lot more explaining required to make the map its info legible. The quantile classification is simple and understandable, but I think equal interval lends the simplest collection for the viewer to see. The equal interval map sets an easy to understand progression through the data. 

Below, I chose to use 6 classes because I felt this did a more productive job displaying the population change. Three classes of positive growth and three classes of negative growth. I manually adjusted the class closest to 0. I rounded my values to the 10^th digit place and used the word to instead of a “-“sign. The intervals were assigned as, -13.5 to -6.3, -6.2 to -2.2, -2.1 to 0, 0.1 to 3.1, 3.2 to 6.6, 6.7 to 10.4. This would create some confusion when using a negative sign after the hyphen. I created an indent for my classes on the legend in order to center the values underneath the header. I lightened the standard text and underlined the title to create some emphasis. The colors chosen were selected on color brewer. I used a divergent scheme and chose to use 6 classes. I originally chose 5 classes but when experimenting with different colors and class numbers with the color brewer I decided that 6 classes would look more appealing so there could be a transition from light blue to light red, opposed to just using a white color.

The material that was reviewed this week is crucial in creating an effective map!