These kinds of maps have their problems, but so do cartograms.
|
|
Electoral cartograms, which visualize the political climates of individual states, are another.
|
|
And for elections, I don't think cartograms are better or worse than geographically accurate maps at all.
|
|
But when population density is taken into account, electoral cartograms show a center akin to Swiss cheese.
|
|
Data: Avalere Health; Cartograms: Lazaro Gamio / Axios As the graphic above indicates, based on data from Avalere Health, premiums are up substantially.
|
|
Since Scheltens has already made the case for cartograms (and it's a good one!), I'll make the case for geographically accurate electoral maps.
|
|
Cartograms are very useful tools to explain the Electoral College, but not necessarily the better visual as results trickle in on November 8.
|
|
It compares cartograms from FiveThirtyEight, the **Washington Post, the **Wall Street Journal, NPR and Daily Kos, to illustrate how different designers go about presenting electoral data.
|
|
This is the cartogram that Liz suggests to improve the typical election map: Here's the thing: Cartograms are an alternative, but they're not necessarily better than geographically accurate maps.
|
|
I think about maps a fair bit, and I'm lucky that it's part of my day job: I built Vox's maps tool (examples of the choropleth maps it produces are here and here) and have created some cartograms too.
|
|
Classical area cartograms (shown on this page) are typically distorting the shape of spatial units to some degree, but they are strict at preserving correct neighborhood relationships between them. Scaled-down cartograms (from the NY Times example) are strictly shape-preserving. Another branch of cartograms introduced by Dorling, replaces actual shapes with circles scaled according to the mapped feature. Circles are distributed to resemble the original topology.
|
|
Block cartograms are constructed by arranging geometrically regular equal-sized blocks, with the number of blocks allocated to each district proportional to the population variable. Several examples of block cartograms were published during the 2016 U.S. presidential election season by The Washington Post, the FiveThirtyEight blog, and the Wall Street Journal, among others.
|
|
Gallery of Data Visualization – Bright Ideas Area cartograms may be contiguous or noncontiguous. The area cartograms shown on this page are all contiguous, where all areas are connected together and continuously deformed, while a good example of a noncontiguous cartogram was published in The New York Times, where each area is disconnected from the rest, and is scaled while maintaining the area's shape. This method of cartogram creation is sometimes referred to as the projector method or scaled-down regions. Cartograms may be classified also by the properties of shape and topology preservation.
|
|
The National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis located on the UCSB campus maintains an online Cartogram Central with resources regarding cartograms. A number of software packages generate cartograms. Most of the available cartogram generation tools work in conjunction with other GIS software tools as add-ons or independently produce cartographic outputs from GIS data formatted to work with commonly used GIS products. Examples of cartogram software include ScapeToad,ScapeToad Cart,Cart: Computer software for making cartograms and the Cartogram Processing Tool (an ArcScript for ESRI's ArcGIS), which all use the Gastner- Newman algorithm.
|
|
A cartogram map is a map that purposely distorts geographic space based on values of a theme. A good example to this would be to make the size of countries proportional to their population. Most commonly used in everyday life are distance cartograms. Distance cartograms show real-world distances that are distorted to reflect some sort of attribute, such as the time between subway stops.
|
|
Dutton also contributed the program DOT.MAP to the Laboratory's family of distributed software (1977). In 1977 James Dougenik, Duane Niemeyer, and Nicholas Chrisman developed contiguous area cartograms.
|
|
Cartogram showing Open Europe estimate of total European Union net budget expenditure in euros for the whole period 2007–2013, per capita, based on Eurostat 2007 pop. estimates (Luxembourg not shown). Net contributors Net recipients One of the first cartographers to generate cartograms with the aid of computer visualization was Waldo Tobler of UC Santa Barbara in the 1960s. Prior to Tobler's work, cartograms were created by hand (as they occasionally still are).
|
|
Demers cartogram is a variation of Dorling cartogram, but it uses rectangles instead of circles, and attempts to retain visual cues at the expense of minimum distance. Schematic maps based on quad trees can be seen as non shape-preserving cartograms with some degree of neighborhood preservation. A collection of contiguous area cartograms is available at Worldmapper,Worldmapper: Rediscover the world as you've never seen it before which was started by a collaborative team of researchers at the universities of Sheffield and Michigan.
|
|
A common use of distance cartograms is to show the relative travel times and directions from vertices in a network. For example, on a distance cartogram showing travel time between cities, the less time required to get from one city to another, the shorter the distance on the cartogram will be. When it takes a longer time to travel between two cities, they will be shown as further apart in the cartogram, even if they are physically close together. Distance cartograms are also used to show connectivity.
|
|
This is common on subway and metro maps, where stations and stops are shown as being the same distance apart on the map even though the true distance varies. Though the exact time and distance from one location to another is distorted, these cartograms are still useful for travel and analysis.
|
|
At the scope of a world map, scale as a single number is practically meaningless throughout most of the map. Instead, it usually refers to the scale along the equator. EU distorted to show population distributions as of 2008. Some maps, called cartograms, have the scale deliberately distorted to reflect information other than land area or distance.
|
|
Graduated symbol maps are another method to represent geographical data. They are an alternative to choropleth map and use symbols, such as pie charts for each area, over a map. This map allows for more dimensions to be represented using various shapes, size, and color. Cartograms, on the other hand, completely distort the shape of a region and directly encode a data variable.
|
|
Cartogram Geoprocessing Tool An alternative algorithm, Carto3F, is also implemented as an independent program for non-commercial use on Windows platforms.Personal Website of Shipeng Sun This program also provides an optimization to the original Dougenik rubber-sheet algorithm. The CRAN package recmap provides an implementation of a rectangular cartogram algorithm. Cartograms can also be constructed manually, either by hand or in a computer-assisted environment.
|
|
An Atlas of Fantasy, compiled by Jeremiah Benjamin Post, was originally published in 1973 by Mirage Press and revised for a 1979 edition by Ballantine Books. The 1979 edition dropped twelve maps from the first edition and added fourteen new ones. It also included an introduction by Lester del Rey. To remain of manageable size, the Atlas excludes advertising maps, cartograms, most disproportionate maps, and alternate history ("might have been") maps, focusing instead on imaginary lands derived from literary sources.
|
|
Other features included historical data on previous elections, charts and animations showing the polls over the course of time, cartograms, and links to hundreds of other pages and external Websites with tables, charts, graphs, and other election data and information. The main algorithm just used the most recent poll(s) in every state. If two polls came out on the same day, they were averaged. This algorithm used all published polls, including those by partisan pollsters such as Strategic Vision (R) and Hart Research (D).
|
|
Dorling in 2011 In September 2013 he became the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography, attached to St Peter's College, Oxford. In his inaugural lecture he spoke about the increasing disparity between Britain's richest 1% and the rest. He said: "Income inequality has now reached a new maximum and, for the first time in a century, even those just below the richest 1% are beginning to suffer, to see their disposable income drop." He has mapped (mainly using cartograms), analysed and commented upon UK demographic statistics.
|
|
This map was reprinted in US News & World Report a few months prior to the 2004 election.[citation needed] After the 2004 election, Vanderbei and then others made similar maps summarizing the results. Quickly thereafter, the term Purple America permeated the political blogosphere and entered the public lexicon as a way of stating that the United States is not as divided as the political pundits would have the people believe. Cartograms developed by Gastner, Shalizi, and Newman at the University of Michigan provide another way to depict election results, which change from a red/blue paradigm to one of shades of purple.
|
|
From 2009 to 2011, López was the PI for the project, Public Knowledge and Perception of Forest Ecosystems Services and Drivers of Ecosystem Change: the Case of the Northern Karst and the Río Piedras Watershed, Puerto Rico which was conducted in collaboration with UPR, USDA, and United States Forest Service Urban and Community Forestry, and Misión Industrial de Puerto Rico. In 2012, she received a Rutgers Council grant for the project, Re-mapping the Insular Caribbean: Visualizing and interpreting environmental data through cartograms. Through the Critical Caribbean Studies initiative at Rutgers University, López researched the urban expansion and natural hazards in Puerto Rico from 2012 to 2013. In 2013, she led the Rutgers University Caribbean Environmental Mapping Initiative.
|
|
Newman is known for his research on complex networks, and in particular for work on collaboration patterns of scientists, random graph theory, assortative mixing, community structure, percolation theory, and network epidemiology.Mark Newman's home page He was also co-inventor, with Michael Gastner, of a method for generating density-equalizing maps or cartograms, which forms the foundation for the Worldmapper web site. Their work gained attention following the 2004 US presidential election when it was used as the basis for a widely circulated map of the election results, which adjusted the size of states based on their population to give a more accurate sense of how many voters voted for each party. Newman's network-based methods have been applied to a variety of fields, including psychology, sociology, economics and biology.
|
|