Yearly Archives: 2008

Early cartograms

I’m kind of on a cartogram kick lately. I’m interested in the pioneers of the form, those who first thought to distort borders and explode topologies in order to convey the distribution of some thematic variable. When was the first cartogram produced, where, and by whom? I ran into a lot of [...]

noncontiguous area cartograms

notes on noncontiguous cartograms and ActionScript 3 classes for producing them
Fully contiguous cartograms have stretched and distorted borders but perfectly maintained topologies. Like the Gastner-Newman diffusion-based cartograms we see all over the place. Though all sorts of cartogram designs have been produced, those with perfect topology preservation (fully contiguous cartograms) receive the majority of [...]

Nightingale’s roses in ActionScript 3

I’ve long been a sucker for the polar area/coxcomb/rose charts popularized by Florence Nightingale. These multivariate charts can show ordered or unordered categorical data. As noted in an Economist piece on influential information graphics,
As with today’s pie charts, the area of each wedge is proportional to the figure it stands for, but it [...]