Mark Newman at the Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan generated this awesome collection of election maps. My favorite is above.
H/T Andrew Sullivan
UPDATE:
As Steve and Josh commented, the red/blue colors can give a biased visual perspective. Here’s the same map with the hue rotated 120 degrees.
very cool maps! Agree about the figure/ground thing…
Comment by josh-wah — November 10, 2008 @ 11:24 pm
I love the extruded catrograms, and I admit that I found solace in them when Kerry lost in ‘04 - they underline that the republicans are most popular where there are no people :)
Here’s a different take on the election cartograms - using transparency or color intensity to represent population density. I don’t know that it solves the red/blue foreground background issue, but they sure are pretty.
I like these cause they keep the geographic frame of reference, right down to the county level - good for planning strategy.
Comment by Daniel — November 28, 2008 @ 2:26 am
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I liked his maps too. My colleague pointed out to me that red is in some ways a poor choice to represent voting choices on a map – humans give such prominence to the color red that we tend to over-estimate its importance. I thought about that as I looked at it, and realized that I definitely see the red as the ‘figure’ and the blue as the ‘ground’…
We also talked about other ways to do the same thing (represent population on the map, as the photo above does). I thought maybe you could use the saturation or intensity of the color to denote the population represented by 1 pixel. Haven’t experimented with it yet, though…
Comment by Steve — November 10, 2008 @ 11:19 pm