This map is a proportional symbol map, on the number of known violent crimes in several of the southern Florida counties during 1990. The counties layer data and the crime data were all from the US Census Bureau, but the added major cities layer that gives more context to the map is from the ESRI data files. The fire red circles displayed in each county are proportional to the number of known violent crimes that occurred in the area in 1990. Each major city is labeled and marked with a star. A pattern forms, as we see the three largest circles, indicating the most crime, are in counties that have more major cities. More significantly, the largest is in the county that contains Miami, a very large and very busy city that would have higher crime rates than other areas. The significant difference between the largest and smallest circle on the map shows just how much cities affect the violent crime that occurs, and is known about. The process of creating this map involved considering whether to do a proportional or dot density map, and I chose the proportional to simplify and exaggerate just how much cities influence crime in a county. In doing so I had to take great care to create the right scale for the map so that each circle of data would fit within its county. This proved to be difficult as with my original plan I included the entire state of Florida, where the differences were extremely pronounced, having huge circles covering up the south of Florida and tiny, almost invisible, dots marking more northern counties. To account for this I focused upon the south of Florida, where a difference could still be seen, but the scale was such that the circles fit within the areas. I also had to set the datum for the map, which was relatively simple as the whole of Florida fits in the 17N UTM zone. The two colors, the one for the background counties and the one for the circles, had to be definite too, so I chose a pale yellow and a fire red respectively.
