NEVADA!

Nevada is an unbelievable place. It is full of desert, mountain, and forest. The government owns most of the state and the parts they don’t are owned by mining companies or railroads. This is a good and a bad thing for mapping the state. The good thing is there is a myriad of data available from the census and other government organizations, so data collection is not an issue. However, the bad thing about Mapping Nevada is out of the 17 counties, about 90% of the population is located in two of them. The other fifteen shows up as blanks in pretty much every data set you have. This makes the types of maps and how you show your maps very important. Meaning you can lie very easily in Nevada because of the types of data. Many mapmakers have shown this by creating multiple layers with differing transparencies; this creates an interesting effect on the mapped layers. By changing even the amount of categories you have to work with, you can change how the map looks and therefore how individuals interpret the information. With these different looks created by processing the same data sets is neat in a way, because this gives the mapmaker the ability to tell many different stories just by selecting a variety of categories to map. Instead of the norm where mapmakers are bound by their data and must tell the story the data dictates.

Having Mapped and appreciated the intricacies of Nevada, I have a greater appreciation of the state and how data fields work in other places as well. Nevada is both beautiful and challenging, but it is also worth mapping and needs to be done more.