Cartogram

A cartogram is a map in which some thematic mapping variable – such as travel time, population, or Gross National Product – is substituted for land area or distance. The geometry or space of the map is distorted in order to convey the information of this alternate variable. There are two main types of cartograms: area and distance cartograms. Cartograms have a fairly long history, with examples from the mid-1800s.

Area cartograms

An area cartogram is sometimes referred to as a value-by-area map or an isodemographic map, the latter particularly for a population cartogram, which illustrates the relative sizes of the populations of the countries of the world by scaling the area of each country in proportion to its population; the shape and relative location of each country is retained to as large an extent as possible, but inevitably a large amount of distortion results. Other synonyms in use are anamorphic map, density-equalizing map and Gastner map.

Area cartograms may be contiguous or noncontiguous. The area cartograms shown on this page are all contiguous, while a good example of a noncontiguous cartogram was published in The New York Times. The online resource SHOW®, provided by Mapping Worlds, creates discontiguous cartograms for different geographies (United States, Japan and World at this time) interactively, allowing users to quickly compare various characteristics. This method of cartogram creation is sometimes referred to as the projector method or scaled-down regions.