Thursday, October 29, 2009

Dork Map Friday

OK, this has nothing to do with DorkFest. Nothing at all. But, I finally colored in my county map after last month's road trip and, per tradition, am showing it here.
The whole pencil-and-paper thing is getting pretty old-school at this point, so I found a good base map and have started the process of coloring it in. So far, though, I've only got as far as 1991.

Yeah, so that (plus a few Alaska boroughs) was the extent of my travels after four years of college and a couple of what felt like "big road trips" during my first year out. I'm a -- what's the word? Oh, "hick."

I found this map while I was leafing through the county notebook. It's from only about five or six years later, 1997ish. It shows the percentage of counties I'd tallied for each state.

So black is 100%, brown 72%, purple 41 - 52%, blue 30-34%, green 15-22%, and yellow 2-7%.

It was satisfying to apply the same scale to my current "collection." The percentages aren't clustered the same way anymore, so on this one, black is still 100%, brown 72-99%, purple 41-71%, blue 30-40%, green 15-29%, and yellow 2-14%.



Cartophiliac has his county map online. Where's yours?
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Anyone doing DorkFest: be advised that I am going to be offline all day Saturday. So, we'll take a look at the ol' entries when I get home on Sunday.
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6 comments:

Cartophiliac said...

I bow down before the Dork County Master.

d said...

this seems like it should definitely be an online sort of activity. every time you start talking about your counties, i think i should go back and try to do this myself, but i seriously lack the motivation.

btw: i just saw an article on a study done in china that found that fruit bats engage in oral sex on a regular basis. another awesome thing about bats.

DrSchnell said...

Looking at your map, I can see that you're in serious need of a giant Texas and southern New Mexico trip. Followed up by one to the depths of the deepest hollers in Appalachia, and the windswept northern plains....

Elaine said...

East Texas is really neat-- the Pineywoods-- as is the Hill Country. But there are a lot of counties in Texas that (forgive me, Lone Star State) ain't worth seein'...trust me.

Jenners said...

I just have an image of you sitting down with a box of Crayolas and coloring your map....with your tongue sticking out, deep in concentration.

Michael5000 said...

@Jenners: Actually, I use colored pencils.