Innovative ways of mapping data about places

Visit the Realities website (link below) for a recording (audio plus images) of a presentation given at Methods in Dialogue: Researching Place. This presentation introduced the idea of visualising society using human area population cartograms. In particular, it discusses equal area cartogram methods (also known as density-equalising maps), which typically re-size each area according the variable being mapped. It also shows how such methods can be used to create maps of the world, with each country re-sized and re-shaped according to a particular variable (e.g. size of the population, number of people living on up to $1US per day, long term unemployment rates etc).