Module 2: Cartography

In Module/Lab 2, we were tasked with creating a map that was able to convey to audiences where the main campus of University of West Florida (UWF) was located within Escambia County, Florida. The map I created (above) hopefully is designed in such a way that accurately conveys that idea. Using blue for rivers, red for interstates, green for land areas, and including symbology to indicate key points helps portray the title of the map (“University of West Florida Main Campus”) to the best of my ability. Including essential elements such as the scale, legend, north arrow, data sources, mapmaker’s name & date made, border, and (most importantly) the title, give additional and necessary information to the map-reader. While that can be a lot of extra bits on the map, it’s important to be able to place items in a way that isn’t overwhelming or too distracting for the map-reader.

We looked through the metadata of several shapefiles (UWF, FL_Cities, Interstate, Major Rivers, FloridaCounties, and EscBoundary) to ensure we had as much accurate data as possible. I found the most trouble being with parsing through the metadata to best determine the time period in which the data is relevant… there are so many dates and years included in the metadata, it can be hard to determine the best answer. Hopefully with more practice, this will become easier.

We clipped (separately) Major Rivers and Interstate to show the major rivers and interstates only within Escambia County, and made sure to label Cities accordingly after querying for the Florida Cities in Escambia County and then exporting the Selecting by Attribute for Pensacola and Ferry Pass (creating new feature layer Escambia_Cities). These all went into our geodatabase, which helped to keep the data and information organized easily. We also learned how to create inset maps, what are essential map elements in this course, how to create a map legend, and the considerations of element placement in this lab.