posts tagged 'symbology'

Hexbins!

Binning is a general term for grouping a dataset of N values into less than N discrete groups. These groups/bins may be spatial, temporal, or otherwise attribute-based. In this post I’m only talking about spatial (long-lat) and 2-dimensional attribute-based (scatterplot) bins. Such binnings may be thought of as 2D histograms. This [...]

Noncontiguous cartograms in OpenLayers and Polymaps

I’m happy to be doing less Flash and more JavaScript development these days. In particular, I’ve been investigating two open-source JavaScript web mapping platforms: one old, OpenLayers, and one new, Polymaps.
OpenLayers has been around a while, but still performs remarkably well as a slippy map framework while allowing easy thematic map customization. Polymaps is [...]

the first thematic maps

Below’s a quick outline of the first maps created with six common cartographic symbologies. All of the below is out there, in books, articles, and blog posts. Particularly helpful are Alan MacEachren’s 1979 article The Evolution of Thematic Cartography, Arthur Robinson’s Early Thematic Mapping in the History of Cartography (1982), Borden Dent’s thematic cartography [...]