After a few months of indieprojector, we thought it’d be interesting to see how it’s being used. Two questions sounded particularly fun to visualize: what geographic areas being mapped with indieprojector, and what projections are the most/least popular? So I grabbed some data and generated some maps, which Mark turned into snazzy visualizations.

click to see full-size (lots of detail)

You’ll want to click that image to see it at its full size and glory. The map shows the bounding boxes of all geographic data uploaded to indieprojector (it excludes layers loaded from the shapefile library we provide). The US is pretty clearly the most popular region for data in indieprojector, but the map shows some interesting variety.

We also made a map for each individual projection available in indieprojector in order to see how the patterns differ. Some projections are appropriate for continent-sized areas, some are appropriate for global data, etc. For the most part, it looks like the projections are being used the way you’d expect: Robinson and cylidrical equal area are popular with global data sets, Albers equal area conic is very popular in the US, and so on. It’s a little hard to discern any significant patterns in the maps, but here they are for each projection. Click the image for a larger size.

It’s worth noting, by the way, that indieprojector was used to export these maps about itself!

The most popular projection is Winkel Tripel, which is not surprising as it is perhaps the best projection for global data. A somewhat surprising second place is orthographic, the “Earth from space” view. The least popular is the sinusoidal projection, which is useful in that it is equal-area, but is not especially attractive. Winkel Tripel has been used about six times more often than sinusoidal.

Stay tuned for some indiemapper upates and a couple of new projections to enter the mix soon!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 at 2:59 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.