Tuesday, November 16, 2004

I live where it's purple I've seen several attempts to put the presidential election results in visual terms, but this whale-looking cartogram is my favorite. In the cartogram, election results are presented county by county, not just by state; voting percentages are averaged out in mixed shades (red + blue equalling purple), and the shape or size of each county is adjusted to indicate population density. An explanation, with a series of red-blue-purple transitional maps, is here. OK, so I had to use my imagination a bit to see a whale there... especially with Florida showing up as a big reddish-purple lobe -- which, on a whale, might be called "a fluke." This fascinating cartographic work is by Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi and Mark Newman at the University of Michigan, adapating the purple coding of Robert Vanderbei at Princeton University. 4:13:46 PM    comment []

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