“Brainpickings” has a great definition of cartograms — they are “maps of countries and areas distorted to reflect non-geographic information about them.”

They are interesting ways to look at data, and at thinking about communities. In some of my classes, I’ve had students draw their neighborhoods and had them use an idea I learned from Jim Burke by write brief labels about important events that occurred in different spots. Student then use those as sources for writing topics. I’m toying with the idea of having students create cartograms of their neighborhoods — not using hard data — but, instead, using ideas like where they feel most safe or unsafe. I’m just thinking out loud at the moment, and would be very interested in hearing other ideas.

In the meantime, though, here are my choices for The Best Sites For Learning About Cartograms (not in any order of preference):

Cartograms: Making a Point with Distorted Maps comes from Brain Pickings.

World Mapper is THE place on the web for cartograms.

How the world really shapes up comes from The Daily Mail.

Cartograms – Images of the social and economic world is from The Rehydration Project.

Images of the social and economic world

The world according to newspapers

Fed Ex has a pretty intriguing “3D” interactive world map online. It contrasts various pieces of data as the size of countries change depending how they rank in those data fields.

How We Share the World is a really interesting series of Cartograms.

Tilegrams lets you create cartograms.

Additional suggestions are always welcome.

If you found this post useful, you might want to consider subscribing to this blog for free.

You might also want to explore the nearly 600 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.