Carto is a powerful web based GIS tool with a robust free option.
Here is the Sample Region Geographic Data needed for this exercise.
2. In the upper right corner click maps and then new map
3. Click on connect dataset, upload the file states_undergrads.csv
4. Toggle to the Data View
5. Now we need to add values to “the_geom” field, to do this click on the name column and then select georeference from the drop down menu
6. Go to Admin. Regions because in this case we are interested in looking at states
7. In the first box, select the field that has the regions names, in this case “name”
8. In the second box, type in the country where the regions are found, here “United States”
9. Hit continue and then Georeference your data with administrative regions
10. Next we need to change the number_st column from a string column to a number column, to do this click on the word string and select number from the drop down menu
11. You will get an error that one field cannot be converted, see if you can fix this issue (hint: numbers in CartoDB should not contain comas)
12. Now toggle back to map view
13. Click on the bar on the right side of the page and click on the paint brush to go to the layer wizard
14. Experiment with several types of graphs using the layer wizard
15. When you find a map to like navigate down to the next section by clicking on the speech bubble, select the information you would like to appear with a click or hover of the mouse
16. The next section, CSS, can be used to edit the map using CSS, but let’s skip that for now
17. In the next section edit any labels and colors until you are happy with the map
18. The final section, filters, can be used to filter through large datasets, since our data set here isn’t too big we’ll skip that for now too
19. Click change basemap in the bottom left corner and pick a basemap you like
20. Use the export image button to Export the map
21. Click “Publish” and explore the options for embedding and sharing the map
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