My first impression upon seeing the voting results this morning in the The Guardian was that Scotland looked overwhelmingly opposed to independence. The entire area of Scotland is colored red. This, of course, is simply due to representing the majority of each council result as the total area of the council jurisdiction, without any consideration at all of population density, not to mention the relative outcomes of the YES or NO votes as a percentage.
Consider the impression made by The Guardian map:
Now consider what the map of the population looks like as a cartogram, in which that the areas are depicted in colors directly proportional to the population density. For sake of the voting results, I have taken Steven Kay’s map and swapped the colors so that the highly populated areas are BLUE, for visual comparison with the voting results map. What would the impression of the outcome be, if The Guardian published a cartogram showing relative populations and how they voted?
–Just saying…
—Lex Berman, GIS Specialist, CGA
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