Cartogrammar

Number of non-UK short-term residents at Country and Unitary Authority level.

Cartogrammar, the ESRC-funded project to make statistical mapping easy (see Newsline 17.2), has delivered a website that hosts a production-strength service and a toolset for creating bespoke cartograms.

A cartogram is a map with distortions that reflect one or more important statistical facts about the areas depicted (see illustration).

The new Cartogrammar website and associated API uses a ‘wizard’-like workflow to handle the uploading of user-supplied data and to capture the required parameters to generate a cartogram. There is a gallery of user-contributed cartograms that may be downloaded and reused by others.

A user guide and some sample data files to assist in getting started are available from the website. In order to use the full functionality of the website, (free) user registration is required. However, no registration is required to simply view or download public cartograms from the user-contributed gallery.

Cartogrammar has been tested with some of the initial 2011 early census release data for England and Wales. If you would like to share your experience of Cartogrammar or make suggestions for future developments, please do not hesitate to get in touch at cartogrammar@ed.ac.uk.

Cartogrammar