Introduction to Cartograms

As a brief part of the final project in the Applied Cartography course, I shortly revisited QGIS to try out a plugin called 'cartogram3', which creates a cartogram. A cartogram is a type of map in which the sizes of geographic regions, such as countries or states, are scaled according to a specific variable or data attribute, rather than their actual land area. Cartograms are used to visually represent the relative importance, distribution, or density of the chosen variable across different regions, supposedly making it easier to identify patterns and trends.

For example, a cartogram depicting the world's population might scale each country's size based on its population, making densely populated countries like India and China appear larger, while less populous countries like Canada and Australia appear smaller. This type of visualization helps emphasize the distribution of the chosen variable, making it easier to grasp the data's spatial relationships and disparities.

Below is my demonstration of this with a comparison between a regular choropleth depiction and a cartogram of municipal populations of Sweden in 2021.