Based on Dan J Lewis’s post, I took population data from various sources through the years 1966 (estimate) to 2001 and created the following animation just to help me visualize the relative growth/shrinkage of population in various districts.
Not very useful yet..
Only opensource software was used to create this. I use Postgis to store the spatial data. I took the processing code from Dan’s post and changed it to match my data. For the population based cartogram’s I used a gdal-based python script, (originally written by Eric B. Wolf).
Contact me if you want the code snippets. For the data, you will have to wait, as I’m working on creating a more easily distributable data format/schema for Nepal.
The above cartogram shows how heavily populated Kathmandu is (along with some of the southern Terai districts) when compared to other districts in Nepal.
Cartograms are interesting way to present statistical data related to geography, specifically to make points around growth or relative size differences.
The background image is the geographical map of Nepal with districts shown in lat-long projection (WGS84). Population Data from the Central Bureau of Statistics was used to create the relative co-ordinates of the districts using the method desribed in “Diffusion-based method for producing density-equalizing maps” by Michael T. Gastner and M. E. J. Newman.
Various pieces of software used were : qgis, ScapeToad, gdal-ogr, python, ruby, clojure.
I will expand on cartograms using various other data pieces in upcoming posts.
Nepalstat, where we dissect statistical data about Nepal try to shed new truths about the trends developing in Nepal, the direction we’re heading towards.
The analysis we share is free for public use as long as Nepalstat is credited.
