Chez Chesler

I hadn't given much thought to cartograms until I saw one on Electoral-Vote.com.

A cartogram is a map on which the area of each division is proportional to some value other than its land area. (Somewhere I've got a periodic table of the elements from my college days with a similar feature: the more common elements have much bigger boxes.) Population, directly or through the "How many electoral college votes" function, is an obvious candidate for a cartogram.

Michael T. Gastner and M. E. J. Newman of the University of Michigan have published a paper describing a computationally-efficient method for generating such maps. One example application they give is a "Mindshare" map in which the area of each state (or for New York City and Washington D.C., city) is proportional to the frequency of their appearance in news stories. Besides being very interesting, it looks awfully familiar: Compare with Saul Steinberg's famous New Yorker cover (popular for a while in parody posters), "A View of the World from Ninth Avenue" (The New Yorker, March 29, 1976.