Big ups to Eric Wolf, who recently released his Python script to generate continuous, “rubber sheet” cartograms. In this case, rather than the ever-so-popular Gastner-Newman diffusion-based method (2004), Wolf uses the Dougenik, Chrisman, and Niemeyer (1985) algorithm. Of the method, the authors initially wrote,
Cartograms are controversial in part because they are difficult to [...]
I thought of this about a year ago, while implementing a dot density map in wiscMapper, but never needed to use it until recently. You see, as I noted recently here, to create a dot density map in Flash, it is typical to create random points within the bounding coordinates of the polygonal feature [...]
My recent work on creating a more flexible circular cartogram algorithm meant that I needed (well, wanted) to load shapefiles into a Python application. After many searches and scouring of message boards, I settled on the OGR/GDAL libraries. And 3 hours later I had it installed on my MacBook…
I’m sure that OGR (vector) [...]