Peer review:

Bivariate Map of North Carolina:

Dot Density of Law Enforcement Officers in West Virgnia

Smerg

Final Project

       For my Final Project I would like to map the location of runners on a memorial running team started and organized by my girlfriend in honor of her brother who was killed in Afghanistan in 2010. There are runners all over the country who either knew him from the Marine Corps or know the family, and I think it could be really cool to show the team where everyone else on the team is located.
       Primarily, the audience for this map would be the members of the team. There are about 60 people who run, many of whom were recently in town for the Marine Corps Marathon and 10K. I think that this will probably work best as a dot density map because many runners are clustered around military bases or DC and it would probably display their distribution quite nicely.
       This map would most likely be of the lower 48. There have been runners from Hawaii and runners representing in Afghanistan and France, but I will most likely use data from the race last month, not all the runners over the last 4 years.
       The data shouldn't be too hard to compile. My girlfriend keeps spreadsheets of peoples mailing addresses because she sends out t-shirts, and this will probably be the source for the majority of my data.
       I will use a base map of the united states, possibly in the round. I think that those look really neat and would like to try it. The globe leaves room for text, which I may add since I am planning to use this map outside the classroom.

       The steps I anticipate are data collection, map making, and polishing. I will delineate between Marathon runners and 10K runners to add a little flavor to the map, and after reviewing my data it looks like there may be some interesting spatial distributions.
       Challenges I anticipate include accurately plotting dots, finding a base layer that I like, and adequately explaining what I am trying to show without cluttering my map.