Final Project Proposal

     For my Final Project, I am taking my summer road-tour travels for 2014 and turning it into a Flight Path Map. During my summer travels, I performed in 40+ cities in 20+ US states, playing trumpet with my band for crowds of over 20,000 people. I had lots of fun during this summer tour, and I want to make a map out of this due to my personal connection.
     I want to take the list of location I have been to and turn it into a flight path map. Even though my tour group did drive to these many location, I think it would be fun to take a different perspective and fly to them instead. This would mean that the scope of the map would be of the 48 contiguous US states. The data used would be quantitative raw data due to the individual locations. This data would come from the Drum Corps International list of US show events and the Cadets Drum and Bugle Corps day-by-day tour events calendar.
     For production, I would have to first sort the raw data and find each location of each city on the map. The next day, I would fill all the art work in, such as the flight path lines and colors. As for challenges,the main one would be clarity of flight path lines, due to the large amount of locations on the 48 contiguous states. And also the color choices, so everything can be distinguished easily. This map's audience would be for those who are fans of the Drum Corps International tour.
     Because during a road trip, the travel path goes from A to B to C, instead of A to B to A to C and back to A, that map would look like a leap frog game. In order to take the traditional, one-point departure flight path approach, I would make all departures from South Riding, VA; because that is where I begin my tour personally before I meet up with my performance group in Johnstown, PA. I am leaning towards the single departure point  for the more traditional look and even more personal touch. I have also thought about color classing the flight lines by month, to show the amount of shows during the respective months of June, July, and August.

http://yea.org/programs/cadets/cadets/events#year=2014&month=7&day=1&view=month
http://www.dci.org/schedule/?mode=corps&corps=The+Cadets