World Population Flags is a Dorling cartogram in which country flags are sized by population. The cartogram is used to visualize where people live around the world and the relative size of each country's population.
A Dorling cartogram is a thematic map that is used to visualize quantitative data. On a Dorling cartogram areas are represented by circles rather than their actual geographic boundaries. The size of each circle is proportional to the variable being represented. In the case of World Population Flags the variable being represented by the circles is country populations.
Dorling cartograms are particularly useful for making it easy to compare values across regions, especially when the actual geographic area sizes are misleading or irrelevant to the data being displayed. For example in World Population Flags the world's biggest country in land area, Russia, appears to be roughly the same size as Bangladesh (which is much smaller in terms of geographic area) because both countries share a similar population size.
The Dorling cartogram in Word Population Flags is used in a scrollytelling presentation to take a closer look at population trends in the world's populated continents. As you scroll through World Population Flags the map zooms and pans automatically to illustrate the relative size of each continent's population. At the end of the presentation you can explore the cartogram for yourself, and hover over individual circles to view each country's population.
You can explore two other methods of visualizing population data on maps in the Maps Mania post If the Romans did Data Visualization.
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