hi my name is kevin turner i work at spanish river high school in boca raton florida where i teach human geography and coach girls soccer love to travel i've been to six of the seven continents haven't quite made it to antarctica just yet and i'm a huge supporter of arsenal winners of the fa cup we're on ap daily we're going to start with topic 1.1 introduction to maps so what are we going to learn in this video basically i want you to know that there's two generalized kinds of maps that we use in our class reference maps and thematic maps reference maps are called reference maps because they are informational we refer to the map to get information you might see a world map a map of your city or an evacuation map of your school in case of a tornado or a fire those are going to be maps that provide information about physical man-made features on the surface of the earth they could be topographical maps showing you elevations of mountains it could be a subway system map so that you know which stop stop to get on or get off or when you walk into a mall and you see that big map of the mall showing you where all the stores are and certainly where the food court is but in our class we're going to focus even more on what we call thematic maps thematic maps because they tell a story they're going to tell us something about quantifiable data something that could be numbered or measured and when we say that it's a story sometimes students will ask well how do i know the story of the map well you read the title kind of like you'd read the title of a book so you're going to read the title of the map and it's going to give you a clue as to what the quantifiable data is going to be shown on that map thematic maps again are the focus of our course but they're also the focus of so many of the questions that you're going to see at the end of this course when you take the advance advanced placement exam so each of the ways that i'm going to show you today about showing thematic data on a map is going to have some strengths and weaknesses and we'll have some visual examples for you so five of the key ways that we use geospatial data to display on thematic maps are choropleth maps which use colors or shading dot maps or distribution maps graduated symbol maps where proportionally the symbol is going to get larger or smaller isoline maps and cartograms so let's take a look at each of these five kinds of thematic maps the first thing i want to show you is i want to show you this reference map this is the glacier national park and this is a map provided by the national park service where it shows shuttle stops and i can see that there's different places where i can get on or get off a shuttle as i traverse my way across the park but notice that this map is not showing me a theme or a story i don't know which one of these stops has more people getting on or getting off of a shuttle i don't know which of these stops is going to be located closest to places where there's more wildlife photo opportunities so this map's not really thematic it's just purely informational i can refer to this map let's look at the thematic ones first the choropleth we said that it's going to use colors or shading look over on the right side of the screen you can see that there's a a table there a legend that's going to show me that the darker the color and that's generally the case with these maps the darker the color the darker the shading the more quantity of the data or the phenomenon that i'm trying to show and of course this map is showing as cove in 19 cases you can clearly see there are states like new york illinois florida georgia texas california very high very elevated you can also see states like maine or vermont west virginia montana wyoming very very low numbers of cases right so that's a great way to show density of that data using a coropleth or shaded or colored map when we want to show distribution a pattern or a spread of information we're oftentimes going to resort to what we call a dot map sometimes it's even called a dot distribution map in this case we can see over on the right hand side that one dot is going to represent 10 000 acres of corn that's being harvested for grain and we can certainly see that the states that begin in the letter i you know indiana illinois iowa all really high levels of corn uh being harvested so when we see this dot map we know that it's gonna be distribution it's gonna not so great for density because again in an area of great density look what happens we get dots on top of dots on top of dots on top if i asked you to quantify and say how many dots do you see in iowa that would be hard for you to do when we say a graduated symbol map makes me think of a joke you know why did the dot map go to college because he wanted to be a graduated symbol map so in this case kids sometimes will say oh well there's still dots but yeah but look the size of the dots is changing because of the quantity or the measurable data that we're going to look at here in this case this is number of plane emplainments or passengers getting on board planes at certain airports around the country look at atlanta hartsfield jackson dallas fort worth lax in la chicago o'hare these are huge airports you know anecdotally if you've ever flown before you might have been through some of those airports and experienced you know a lot of delays and those kinds of things well that's again partly because of volume and so you can see over here on the right lower right side there's a there's a scale there that shows you a legend that shows you right how many people are boarding uh at each of those airports and then we're going to use something here that's called an isoline map i sometimes tell students this looks a little bit like a thumb print sometimes like a bowl of spaghetti which can be a little confusing but what we're going to see here is that the area of concentration is going to be again a darker color sometimes they won't use color on isoline they'll just have the lines and what you'll have to figure out is that every time you cross a line you're going to be changing the value of that quantifiable data it helps when they put the colors in there as well but they don't have to sometimes you'll just see it with the black and white imagery there and you'll know that every time you cross a line that you're going to change value you also know that when the lines are closer together you're changing value rapidly and when the lines are farther apart the value is fairly flat or it's not really all that differing cartograms are going to be a little bit more unique in the sense that the physical size of what we're mapping is going to change according to the the value of the data i always try to think about a cartogram is almost like cartoon right it's kind of zany whimsical it's kind of almost looks like it's it's it's hand drawn and so cartogram in that way helps me remember that it's not going to be true to geographical size it's going to be proportional to the phenomenon that we're measuring again so again look at florida look at california texas new york this is you know census data population as of the last census and so the states that are you know look at the dakotas you know the two dakotas there they're almost invisible montana almost doesn't even appear and that's because a lot of the states out there in the in the mountain west uh and on the great plains are not all that populous so let's take a look at some questions that they might ask on the exam let's let's practice together so this map is a thematic map how can we tell it's thematic well we learned that the title is going to give away the theme of the map dairy farms in the united states and it says that the map shows the distribution of dairy farms well remember we talked about dot maps doing doing a great job of showing us a distribution they're not so good at areas of concentration and that's why we kind of see some you know areas of a lot of dots on overlapping with other dots but it says the map shows the distribution of dairy farms across the lower 48 states and it says each dot represents approximately 10 dairy farms so i want you to think with me what kinds of questions do you think that they could ask us on the exam based on the information that we can see in this map they might ask us for places where there's a concentration of dairy farms and we already kind of pointed that out pennsylvania ohio indiana particularly wisconsin and think anecdotally has anybody ever heard of anybody that wears cheese on their heads at football games oh yeah that's those people green bay packer fans who live in wisconsin wisconsin's famous for dairy so they might ask us about that concentration they could also ask us about places where there doesn't seem to be a lot of dots so we could look at the deep south across texas and out into the desert southwest for that matter most of the mountain west and the great plains seems to not be all that you know populous with dairy farms so definitely we can think about ways that a test item writer might ask us questions utilizing the information that we've learned in topic 1.1 introduction to maps so what should we take away from this video if a picture is worth a thousand words you've heard that saying well a map must be worth a million maps are the basic tools of geographers we're going to use maps in this course to both ask and answer questions what should you be able to do now you should be able to identify the two main types of maps reference and thematic and you should be able to explain their purpose you should be able to describe the relevant characteristics of the five kinds of thematic maps that i showed you today and i also want to challenge you in your own life next time you're presented with a map ask yourself what type of map is this what kind of information are they trying to show me what kind of quantifiable data am i supposed to see on this map and why have they chosen this type of map as opposed to maybe one of the other kinds of thematic maps that they could have chosen but they chose this one maybe because it has a different way of showing that data that information well until next time think like a geographer and we'll see you on ap daily