ABSTRACT
This chapter begins the coverage of methods for exploratory data analysis (EDA) and exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) with a review of basic mapping principles and choropleth maps. Some fundamental concepts behind EDA and ESDA are first discussed, such as the central role of an abductive approach and the importance of dynamic graphics in visual analytics and geovisualization. This forms the basis for the linking and brushing architecture behind GeoDa that allows the selection of observations in any view of the data (a window) to be dynamically updated in all the other windows. In GeoDa, dynamic data exploration is designed with the map as an interactive visualization tool.
A short primer reviews the Map functionality of GeoDa. Basic elements, such as the map legend, color and map classification are introduced for three classic classifications: quantile maps, equal interval maps and natural breaks maps. Some practical options include adding a base map tile to the map, saving the classification, saving the map as a graphics file and removing outlines to highlight larger regions in the data. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how custom categories can be introduced and saved in a GeoDa Project File for later reuse.
