I love maps and I love charts. So I was particularly excited to find this great chart of the world’s population by latitude, which obviously resembles a map (because most people live on land):
This is a much more eloquent way of combining latitude and longitude population charts, as I’ve previously posted about here.
At the bottom of the post, the creator links to whackdata.com, where Ryan Brideau posted some R scripts that take publicly available data and create similar population map charts. Ryan does a great job describing why the chart is so interesting:
“What I love about it is that, in the absence of any traditional map features, the outlines of countries and continents are immediately apparent. And as long as you are familiar with what the land masses of the globe look like, you know exactly what the plot is without even needing to be told. Another interesting feature is that the peaks also give information about both the population and and the density: the area under the graph represents the total population, while the higher the peak, the more dense it is. (Hence the huge peak of Tokyo, and the low, wide peak of Mexico City.)”
Having only a little experience with R, I thought this was a good opportunity to see if I could use Ryan’s scripts to make something similar for the Boston area.
After a bit of tinkering, here’s what I came up with for Massachusetts:
And here’s greater Boston:
Not bad. Thanks Ryan.