Category Archives: Maps and Cartograms

Maps and cartograms

Using Flow Maps to show derivative products

Flow maps show branches of data which form part of a whole and are often used to show deriv­a­tive prod­ucts made from a sin­gle source. These were quite pop­u­lar in the early 20th Cen­tury to show ship­ping traf­fic from ports. In this exam­ple it shows the com­po­nents that con­tribute to the 3M stock price. Post-​its and office pro­duces

Chart of the Week: Timeline+Segmentation+ Scatterplot

Information-​dense charts show mul­ti­ple rela­tion­ships in data in a sin­gle, chart. They take more time to read/​review, but pro­vide deeper insights. This week’s exam­ple from R.W Brun­skill’Illus­trated Hand­book of Ver­nac­u­lar Archi­tec­ture shows the evo­lu­tion of “ver­nac­u­lar archi­tec­ture”. Ver­nac­u­lar archi­tec­ture ” will have been designed by an ama­teur, prob­a­bly of the occu­pier of the intended build­ing and one

Area Proportional Venn Diagrams

Venn dia­grams are great for under­stand­ing how sets inter­sect and relate to each other, but most don’t indi­cate quan­tity. So if you have a set that shows pet own­er­ship (some own dogs, some dogs and fish,etc): With a pro­por­tional Venn dia­gram, you add the dimen­sion of size or count. For exam­ple, Peo­ple who own a dog+cats (ab) would

Chart of the Week: Bucket vs. Pail

What’s the dif­fer­ence between a pail and a bucket? Accord­ing to this chart in Word Geog­ra­phy of the East­ern States (Kurath, 1941), most of the New Eng­land and New York use “pail” (tri­an­gle) , while Penn­syl­va­nia and the lower mid-​Atlantic states use “bucket”. Data con­text: Kurath had local research teams who focused on cities and towns which had been

Cartogram of the US Election

Car­togram of the US elec­tion in 2004. The size of each box is pro­por­tional to elec­toral votes, color is the can­di­date, and layout/​shape is roughly the same as geo­graphic place­ment. From this it’s poss­ble to see the West, North­east and North­ern Midwest …