Dot Mapping

Here is my map and Process Summary for this week's assignment

Process Summary

1.       Copied the files from the R: drive to the S: drive
2.       Read through the instructions completely
3.       Experimented with the layers in the Illustrator file a bit to get familiar with them.
4.       In Excel, made a new sheet only including: Manatee County, Sarasota County, Hardee County, Desoto County, Highlands County, Glades County, Hendry County, Charlotte County, Lee County, Collier County,St. Lucie County, Martin County, Palm Beach County, Broward County, Miami-Dade County. Monroe County.  This will let me base my stats on just these counties.
5.       The majority of my time was spent trying to determine the best dot size for my map.    This was based on a lot of trial and error.     Originally I wanted to try to do 2000 total points, but at this scale I couldn’t get the dots to fit into my Dade County.   So I tried making a smaller dot size with no luck so I decided to bump down the number of total points
6.       I determined with my legible dot size that I could get a little over 400 dots of this size into Miam-Date county so I started with that.   And I also wanted to make sure I had a few points in the most sparse county so I took my original number and determined it was about 66% of that.   So my final numbers for each county came out to be:

Glades County	2
Hardee County	5
DeSoto County	6
Hendry County	7
Monroe County	15
Highlands County	17
Martin County	24
Charlotte County	27
St. Lucie County	36
Collier County	48
Manatee County	50
Sarasota County	62
Lee County	83
Palm Beach County	214
Broward County	307
Miami-Dade County	426

7.       Using some simple math I determined that each dot represented 5288 people.
8.       So now the fun began.    A LOT of cutting and pasting, arranging, re-arranging to get the dots to fit my counties given special consideration to avoid rivers and wetlands.
9.       If I had it to do over again, I probably would have zoomed in on the area of interest of South Florida a bit before starting to place dots.
10.   This exercise makes me appreciate how hard these procedures would be without some of the software tools that we rely on.