Simon St. Laurent tweeted a link to: Maps of the 2012 US presidential election results by M. E. J. Newman.
Newman used cartograms to create presentations of the 2012 U.S. presidential election results. (Cartograms substitute another variable for land area in the presentation.)
Newman’s maps correct the distortion that has most of the U.S. colored “red,” when in fact the “blue” candidate, Obama, carried both the popular and electorial vote.
I don’t recall any topic map display that I would call cartograms. You?
Leaving aside a cartogram applied to a geographic map as an interface to a topic map, how else to apply cartograms to a topic map?
Depends on the characteristics of the topics but are there general principles? Even for classes of characteristics?
I have long considered tag and word clouds to be a sort of semantic cartogram, where the variable substitutes for font size instead of land area. It could be an interesting way to show topic types in a topic map UI, where the size could give you an idea of how many topics of each type are in the map. I can’t think of any topic map display that uses this idea, though.
Comment by marijane — November 9, 2012 @ 9:48 am
marijane: That’s a good idea, the varying font size to show incidence of a topic in a map. Only testing could determine when the display becomes too “busy” to be useful, i.e., variations are too small to notice or too many to be useful.
Come to think of it, star charts use size to represent magnitude of stars and that works out to six or seven (from memory).
Other map size artifacts that come to mind?
Comment by Patrick Durusau — November 12, 2012 @ 5:53 am