Aleks sends in this item from Gabriel Florit on choropleth classification systems. Oddly enough, Malecki and I were just talking about color mapping schemes earlier today.
The benefit of the continuous color scale
Aleks sends in this item from Gabriel Florit on choropleth classification systems. Oddly enough, Malecki and I were just talking about color mapping schemes earlier today.
Andrew, I’m curious what software you use to create choropleths. I’ve looked around R for beautiful solution, but came up with something that was just okay ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXaBT22w8G4&list=UUd1MSCNy5v9i8UGkSc6tCmg&index=1&feature=plcp ).
Ian:
We’ve been using R base graphics, taking a lot of care to get the details how we like them. Our soon-to-be-released mrp package will have pretty U.S. maps by state as a default option.
The diverse applications of the modern color scale are truly remarkable, and underscore the great utility that lies in precise communication.
interesting link-spam here …
Isn’t using a continuous color scale to represent continuous values kind of the obvious choice?
The advantage of having discrete (and easily identifiable) colors would be that it makes it easier to map a color on the graph/map to a clearly defined value range. But for that to work well you would need to use a very limited number of discrete classes, I guess.