Cartogram - Area Cartograms

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.

A collection of about 700 area cartograms is available at Worldmapper, a collaborative team of researchers at the Universities of Sheffield and Michigan.