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For the German election we wanted to use a cartogram of German election districts but didn't find anything good, so we created our own. Here's a little nerd thread how the final algorithm worked 🤓 🧵 #gis #cartogram #election #datavis #cartography

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Ha that’s not bad! I like the outer shape. But Brandenburg is pushed entirely to the eastern border and Berlin almost touches Hamburg. Very tricky case, but it’s definitely the best hexagonal cartogram I’ve seen so far.

Yes, a "donut" case is usually a tricky one, there is always a trade-off. I went with more simplicity (and keeping the state as one) against more correct geo representation. It is a similar case with Niederösterreich and Vienna. NÖ should be all around, but there just not enough people🤷.

This is great! Is there any reason you can't do this as well for the Zweitstimmen map as well (with the dots for for each district vote shares shaded in the same way as the geographical map)?

Before running the network layout simulation on this, we marked all the outer districts as fixed. This allows the final layout to stay "in shape" of the country as a whole, which is important for readers to recognize their country. We used the TopoJSON arcs to automatically find these districts.

Toll, dass sich das weiterentwickelt mit der Diskussion um die letzten Wahlen! Auch nicht schlecht: die Realität ist diverser.

Campact e.V.@campact.de

⚠️ Fläche wählt nicht – Menschen tun es! ⚠️ Und: Bei der Bundestagswahl gilt nicht Winner-Takes-All, sondern prozentuale Gewinne! Wir haben hier mal eine alternative Karte gebastelt: Die Zweitstimmen der Bundestagswahl 2025 prozentual dargestellt, im Verhältnis zur Einwohnerzahl der Bundesländer.

As a layman in geovisualisation i was thinking about doing something similar as a hobby project, but projecting onto a rectangular grid. Instead of forces I'd try to do some combinatorial optimization with a "distance from geographical position" term, very similarly to this approach. Inspiration: