About this Page:
Yet another page that took me entirely too long. Ugh. To be honest, I’ve been dreading these pages since their inception. Maybe “dread” isn’t the right word. I just knew that these would be difficult because of the maps I needed to create. I attained the data for these maps using other sources, but recreated them in Autodesk Sketchbook. After probably 30 cups of coffee, here is what I was able to churn out. The dot-density map was created from data attained from the U.S. Geographic Survey website. You can enter the date range and seismic threshold desired and out pops a map with a whole bunch of dots. 
I decided to focus my attention on the good ol’ Ring of Fire and my copy and paste fingers were feeling muscle fatigue. I put the image that the USGS gave me as my base layer and then threw my world map on top. I then created a homemade sphere and went to copy-paste town.
For my second map, I was inspired by a professional development discussion that I recently went to about the history of the partition of India. I never had a class on this topic so it was a great addition for my teaching notes. While I was there, I created an FRQ and a map that corresponds. I used a couple of maps I found online as inspiration/information and made the flow-line map.
And for the last map…don’t even get me started on cartograms. I searched for a good two weeks for a user-friendly source to make custom cartograms, and what I find is quite disappointing. There was an amazing Brexit cartogram that I really wanted to use, but I was told I needed to pay for it, so I opted elsewhere. If you haven’t checked out ViewsoftheWorld.net, it’s worth a gander. The guy is a data visualization geography master who took some classes at Oxford. He loves cartograms, and here’s his Brexit beauty that I speak of…
I was not given the key to the cartogram-making door via this source. Scapetoad and another German source proved also poor (and best used with old versions of Java and PC computers (blah). Cartograms are difficult to make. This would NOT be a good lesson plan if you haven’t really thought about how students should figure out the proportions math for each area. Not to mention-if you wanted to make it a contiguous cartogram-all of those blobs have to somehow be connected with their neighbors whilst taking into consideration its new bloated size.
So, I found another source map and once again found myself tracing an image. Have you ever wondered why artists are so protecting of their work, but then when you go to a comic-con, everyone is tracing and redrawing and selling their own Spider-Man and Batman art? It’s always been a bit of a weird hypocritical concept to me, but here I am, finding myself doing the same. If I had the tool, I would make my own. Maybe you know of a good cartogram making tool that is user-friendly? Send me the link.
Did you know that there are three different types of cartograms? No? Ha! Me neither! But there are. Contiguous, Non-contiguous, and the Dorling. I think I enjoy the Non-contiguous type the best, but of course it has the most boring name. How about you?
Other optical illusions I messed with on this page were the marker style backgrounds and filling blank space with arrows. Thanks to Dan Harris, my illustrator, for my characters. Everything else on this page was illustrated by myself.
Ourvireow.
That’s….good bye in French.
Ok, that was a first shot without looking at Google.
Here is what the Googs tells me…
Au Revoir
