For my final project I have chosen to create a map of the United States spending for financial Aid to other foreign nations. I find this topic fascinating because it ties in nicely with my areas of study. We have always heard of the US dolling out monetary funds to other Nations for assistance with economic development, military assistance or for other unknown reasons. I have seen other maps that have been created for this subject but would like to attempt it myself.

For the basic layout of the map I will attempt for fins a base map using ArcGIS. I will try and use a map that will show the world for what it is. I believe that an equal area type of map possibly a cylindrical map will allow me to show my data in an interesting way. In this I will also try and find a map that not contain Antarctica since this should contain no data. For the way that I will attempt to convey the data that I find I will lean for either a Choropleth map or if needed maybe even try for a proportional symbol map if I could find a way to not have the map look cluttered.

I have already begun to look for my data that I will need and have found that the US Census bureau list the amount of aid that the US gave to other nations in 2009. The data is listed in dollar amount in millions of dollars. I will have to figure out which method to use to break the data down into classes but as of right now I believe that I could use something along the lines of equal intervals. If I am unable to find a nice way to divide the data into good groupings I may look to see if there are natural breaks.

Scheduling the making of this map should not be very hard at this moment. For the most part I believe the largest requirement of time that I shall have will be the gathering of everything that I need and converting it all into a usable format just before the actual map making process itself.  I expect this portion of the process to really take me no more than 1.5-2 weeks as of right now with my time constraints as they are. I am looking to have a map ready to critique around Thanksgiving which should give me enough time to go bac and fix anything that may come forth with observation and suggestion.