Cartography Data Classification Lab

This map depicts the percentages of African Americans in Escambia County, Florida via four types of classifications including natural break, quantile, equal interval, and standard deviation. These examples were created using ArcMap 10.1.

1. Copy and pasted zip file to s: drive, unzip Data Classification files
2. Open Escambiacensus.shp in ArcGIS
3. Attribute table
4. Right click> escambiacensus>properties> symbology> quantity>quantities>graduated colors> p_black>
5. Insert>data frame> copy and paste previous data frames
6. Right click map in table of contents re-name each according to classification
7. Update classification in each new data frame
8. Layout veiw>Page set up> landscape> re size each map so they fit on the page
9. Insert legend below each map, insert north arrow in each map, insert scale below all legends, add title, add name, date created, and data source

Both the equal interval and standard deviation create a map that doesn't show the data as well as the quantile and natural break maps. However, it’s the natural break map that shows a better distribution because “it minimizes differences between values in the same class and maximizes differences between classes” (Slocum, 2009, pg. 4).