Lab 5: Task 1-1
Lab 5: Task 1-2
Lab 5: Task 2-1
Lab 5: Task 2-2
Discussion
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Task 1: Discuss the effectiveness of the visual variables (what are they? how are they used? Are they effective at communicating the relevant information? Are there better ways to represent the variables?)
This task used three visual variables: size, color, shape. In task 1-1, circles were used to indicate the internet users, the size of the circle was used to indicate the number of internet users and the color was used to indicate the country boundary. In task 1-2, circles were also used to indicate the internet users, the size of the circle was used to indicate the number of the internet users, but this map used circle color to indicate the country. In my opinion, the size of the circle is the most effective variable to communicating the information, but some of the circles are too small which resulted that we can not tell the difference of the color, thus, the other two variables color and shape are not very effective. I think the Choropleth map would be much better since we just use the color to represent different counties.
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Task 2: Discuss how the maps achieve figure-ground relationship (what is figure-ground relationship? What techniques are typically used to achieve figure-ground relationship? How are they used here? You can review lecture handouts).
Accentuating one object over another based on the perception that one object stands in front of another and appears to be closer to the map user. There are two methods to achieve figure-ground relationship: making points lines darker than their surroundings and making areas lighter than their surroundings to increase their visual weight when appropriate. In task 2-1, we used the light icons and dark background map to increase their visual weight. In task 2-2, we made the points darker than their surroundings.