Rectangular Cartogram represents regions by rectangles.
Also referred as Raisz Cartogram named after American cartographer Erwin Raisz, these cartograms use rectangle size to encode a specific statistical value with a preserved aspect ratio close to the shape of the geographic region.
The rectangular cartogram below displays population size in Belarusian regions, representing urban and rural population for each region with treemap in addition.
Hover over rectangles for details, use checkbox to toggle between Raisz Cartogram and geographical display.
There are also contiguous variants of rectangular cartograms (see RecMap: Rectangular Map Approximations by Roland Heilmann, Daniel A. Keim, Christian Panse, Mike Sips; On rectangular cartograms by Marc van Kreveld and Bettina Speckmann). However, the result could be rather schematic and distorted.
One more method is a Demers cartogram, a special case of rectangular cartograms which is also considered as a variant of Dorling cartogram but with squares instead of circles.
The advantage of this method is that squares can be packed more compactly than circles, so they can be placed more closely with the geographical location of the regions.
This data visualization is as a part of Graphing Belarus series, a personal project to explore Belarus with data.
The rectangular cartogram is built with D3.js using topojson and d3-force module. flubber is used to make smoothly shapes transition.
This visualization was inspired by The Data Visualization Catalogue Chart Snapshot series Raisz and Demers Cartograms, Rectangle Cartogram and Demers Cartogram notebooks by Nicolas Lambert.
Data source: Belarus population on Jan. 1, 2024. National Statistical Committee of the Republic of Belarus.