This is cool. The paper just out in PLoS Medicine features Worldmapper illustrations of global public health data. As author Danny Dorling notes, “You can say it, you can prove it, you can tabulate it, but it is only when you show it that it hits home.” For example, below is a map showing public health spending. Hmmm, where did Africa go?
From Worldmapper:
The maps presented on this website are equal area cartograms, otherwise known as density-equalising maps. The cartogram re-sizes each territory according to the variable being mapped.
The only thing is, as you spend some time browsing the maps on the Worldmapper site, you start to realize that the more distorted the map is due to unequal distributions, the less you are able to intuit what it means. Some of the maps are really whack and the countries/continents start to look like internal organs or something totally unrecognizable. But it is cool.
Filed under: science
How about a simple graph or pie chart for those of us who are less abstract and more exacting in our thinking.