Michael Swaim's Map Portfolio

A gallery of my maps.

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Analyzed climate change vulnerability and adaptation for microbasins in the Ch’orti region of Guatemala.

Maps published in: "Estrategia de Adaptación al Cambio Climático en la Región Ch’orti", by Fernanda Zermoglio.

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2002 livestock inventories for a trade journal.

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An early reference map of data availability. This map is obsolete and not descriptive of the actual data availability which is complete. This map uses a single hue/two saturation for each region. The lighter hue indicate boundary data sets only. The darker hue indicates both boundary and supplementary data as of November 2007.

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Sample of maps created for “Guyana: Population, Environments, Economic Activities” by Dr. Robert Ramraj http://www.amazon.com/Guyana-Population-Environments-Economic-Activities/dp/0972829253

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A series of Crime Analysis maps I created after the theft of a GPS from my car. The data was scraped from the Greensboro, NC crime mapper website. Only street block ranges were available, so the points only represented the center of the street line for a particular range of numbers. 

The points were aggregated to Census Blockgroups to generate a series of reference maps of crime in Greensboro for February 10th to August 9th of 2013.

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These are maps I created as examples for my Cartography students in 2006. I chose countries that were in the news as the topic for the assignment. The students were to create general reference maps they might show to decision makers, TV news or print media, or general public displays.

We discussed their own biases they might introduce into the map making process and eventually why they made particular design decisions. The map of Israel can be a particular political flash point depending on the audience, for instance, so this went beyond simple color choices, position of text or symbols used for cities and towns.

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The Battle of Guilford Courthouse: an Animated Map

I am in the slow process of updating this with a higher resolution and better effects, but for now it works.

A generalized animated map showing highlights of the battle at Guilford Courthouse located in present day Greensboro, North Carolina. This animation has been…

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A map I created based on GPS data I collected and Greensboro city data on and around the Guilford Courthouse National Military Park. There have been some changes since the map was created, for one, the Tannenbaum Historic Park is now park of the National Military Park having been sold by the city to the Federal Government some time ago.

The Adobe Illustrator file was submitted to the National Park Service Cartographic Unit where it was edited and divided up into sections for use as wayside maps along the tour road and trails.

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I created this map as a class project for a Cartography class in April of 2000. This map uses a point symbol called Chernoff Faces. Faces are familiar to us, they convey a lot of data about people behind them. Using faces in this way, it is believed, is a good way to convey multiple data points to map readers. I have found it effective with socioeconomic data largely.

In this case, the faces represent three data sets: beer consumption, education funding, and UFO sightings. All of the data is real, but the websites may no longer be available. There was little significance in the data, though there are three obvious patterns that become apparent. High education funding through the Northeast. High UFO sightings through the Southwest and high beer consumption around Utah, which has low beer consumption.