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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

Then we used a Delaunay tessellation of the district centroids. This later helps the districts to stay close to their geographical neighbors.

Due to Germany's convex outer shape we removed edges longer than a certain threshold and ended up with this final "network" of nodes and links.

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.