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I have already seen maps using deformation to visualize information. For example, this map shows temporal distance between some French cities when traveling by train: http://www.nf-ameublement-pro.com/sc/images/new/newsletter/septembre/carte_france.jpg

Is there a name for this kind of map? Also, is this type of map available in any GIS software?

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  • The effect of the TGV (especially Paris-Dijon-Lyon) is particularly pronounced in this illustration.
    – whuber
    Commented Nov 8, 2011 at 18:22
  • Trimaps (trimaps.com) enables to use that kind of maps in application and geolocalize on it. Note that you have to come with the map...
    – Gilbou
    Commented Nov 14, 2014 at 15:26

5 Answers 5

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This is called a distance cartogram. Some add-ons for ArcGIS have been produced to create area cartograms. Mark Newman provides free GIS-independent software to implement his area cartogram method. Methods of creating distance cartograms are known in statistics as multidimensional scaling (MDS). I do not know of any GIS software that implements MDS, but it's available in full-featured statistical packages like Stata (commercial) and R (free).

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12

Anamorphic map or even cartographic anamorphosis are also used.

Scapetoad does it.

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Scapetoad produces area cartograms, not distance cartograms. You can produce distance cartograms with Darcy You can download the software (Java program) : https://sourceforge.net/projects/jdarcy/

Before using Darcy you have to transform the distance matrix in coordinates (multi dimensional scaling). In R the simple function for MDS is cmdscale. Now, Darcy implements this R function.

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There is another type which is called "Cartogram"
QGIS has a plugin to generate cartograms.
This one shows the size of the country based on GDP:
Cartogram of "GDP per capita" by country, 2000

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    The original map is at maps.grida.no/go/graphic/world_economy_cartogram (Philippe Rekacewicz, UNEP/GRID-Arendal, Vladimir S. Tikunov). @Pablo appears to be correct but the legend title is wrong (and so is the description on the Web site): apparently, the map areas are proportional to GDP and the colors denote GDP per capita.
    – whuber
    Commented Mar 17, 2011 at 19:35
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I've found the DistanceCartogram plugin (https://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/author/Matthieu%2520Viry/) for QGIS. But it keeps getting lots of errors when I try to use it.

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