Geographic Perspectives

Over the Christmas break from school, I threw together some ideas I was playing with. Here it is in a very crude, Alpha format: aniCart Alpha 1.0. I included a dataset to get an idea of how it works - but you can use it with any ESRI Shapeifle.

Basically, aniCart is a pure C++ implementation of the Dougenik, Chrisman, Neimeyer algorithm that I use in CartogramCreator for ArcGIS and pyCart. This implementation has the advantage of being quite fast. In fact, it's fast enough to animate the cartogram creation in real-time.

When open a shapefile in aniCart, you can click on the numeric fields listed on the left. The geometry will redraw dynamically to the cartogram (ten iterations right now). You can then click on another numeric field and watch the geometry change again.

To-Do:

1. Things start getting rather squirrelly after a few different variables, so I'd like to add the option to "revert to original" between variables.
2. It always does 10 iterations. There are times when you need more (like with large differences between the smallest and largest units).
3. Export - right now you can't save the output in any format.

Have fun! Email me if you have any questions or ideas!