Geographic Perspectives

I "discovered" cartograms in a lab exercise from a class in Issues in Cartographic Design. What initially caught my eye was the challenging mathematics behind the creation of cartograms (and the lack of automated scripts for ESRI ArcDesktop). For my term project in that class, I explored some of the literature relating to cartograms. In the next semester, for the term project in a GIS Programming course, I wrote the first iteration of the CartogramCreator script for ArcDesktop 9.0. After the end of the semester, I added the ability to create contiguous cartograms (that first version only created non-contiguous cartograms) and put together a simple paper and presentation that I delivered at the 2005 ESRI User Conference in San Diego.