Warping World Cartogram

The World

This animation, especially when using the time slider to manually warp the cartogram, allows a user to participate in the process of assigning population to polygons, which helps with the interpretation of the data. That is the overall mission of geovisualization, and this animation works towards that mission by trying to increase accessibility and interpretability. A shortcoming of this animation is that all countries are grouped as a whole, so population distribution within a country is not accounted for. This is especially an issue in the United State - for example, Alaska takes on a large proportion of the United States' landmass, thereby shrinking the contiguous United States and expanding Alaska to an area that is much bigger than what it should be.

Warping Florida Cartogram

Florida

The benefits of the world cartogram animation are maintained and highlighted on the state level. This time a viewer gets to imagine urban areas and see how cities truly blow up in size. Focusing on the southeastern part of the tip illustrates this process with Miami. Try clicking and dragging the time slider to move through the animation. This is a big part of this visualization tool - interactive design. We are living in a time where we have to tools to allow for people to interact with once static products. This map is meant to be played with. This interaction fosters deeper learning and internalization of the information within.

Warping Texas Cartogram

Texas

Texas is an example of a state for which this visualization is perfect. The final state of the cartogram animation is almost unrecognizable as Texas, making it hard for a non-cartographer to interpret such a cartogram. This is a problem of accessibility, and a cartogram animation solves this problem. As the time slider moves right, a viewer can see the expansion of Dallas/Fort Worth, Austin/San Antonio, and Houston to the point where they dominate the entire state by area. Once again, 'urbanization' in a state like Texas is hard to describe, because people are not necessarily living in apartments downtown, but are rather concentrated in houses surrounding the cities. This cartogram clearly shows the "urban hubs" of Texas without needing to draw an arbitrary metro area line.

Warping Washington Cartogram

Washington

Like Texas, the final cartogram of Washington would be unrecognizable unless the viewer was told that it was Washington state. I chose Washington as an example because there is truly only one major city - Seattle. We see Seattle take shape (literally) as the animation progresses, dwarfing all other features of the state, except for Spokane. Before creating this cartogram, I did not know that Spokane existed; its survival of the Seattle onslaught brought it to my attention and revealed a small hub in Eastern Washington state of which I was formerly unaware.

Warping Massachusetts Cartogram

Massachusetts

The benefits of the world cartogram animation are maintained and highlighted on the state level. This time a viewer gets to imagine urban areas and see how cities truly blow up in size. Focusing on the southeastern part of the tip illustrates this process with Miami. Try clicking and dragging the time slider to move through the animation. This is a big part of this visualization tool - interactive design. We are living in a time where we have to tools to allow for people to interact with once static products. This map is meant to be played with. This interaction fosters deeper learning and internalization of the information within.