Category Archives: GIS
A population-centric map projection
Here is some material from a presentation at this year’s AAG Annual Conference in Washington DC. The presentation People powered maps: A population-centric map projection was given in the session on Topics in GIS, Remote Sensing, and Spatial Analysis and showed some new works on our grid-based cartograms (as presented at GISRUK 2009 and ESRI UC 2009).
The following animation shows the transformation of a topographic map of the United States, ending in a grid-based population cartogram (and then reversing). Please notice that loading the animation takes a while on slower internet connections:
This is the full presentation given at the AAG Meeting. Please note that the animated parts such as the above animation are not shown in this Slideshare version:
Gridded cartogram tutorial
This is a short slideshow showing the basic steps that are needed to do your own gridded population cartograms (with a quite rough 1 degree grid – good for starting with this whole thing). Software needed for this simple click-through tutorial are ArcGIS and ScapeToad. If you want to go one step further, I’d recommend using the ArcScript Cartogram Geoprocessing Tool by Tom Gross, even though this is not featured in this demo:
The tutorial was given in October 2009 to students of the Module GEO6016 Data, Visualisation and GIS in the MSc in Social and Spatial Inequalities at the University of Sheffield.