I've always wondered about mapping data and cartograms and I just found a perfect instance around which to center a few questions:
A few weeks ago, this map of the human development index by state was put up on wikipedia. Recently it has come under fire because the color coding causes it to misrepresent the differences between states. That is, Mississippi is colored yellow and WV colored light green even though their difference is 0.001.
My first question would be what is the best way to make this map? If it were up to me, with my limited knowledge, I would grab this blank map from wikipedia, make up some bins (.75-.79, .80-.85, etc.) and a color scheme, fire up an image editor and just colorfill the different sections. Is there a better way?
What about the color difference problem between MS and WV? My first instinct would be to just map the values from maybe .750 - 1.000 onto a 8-bit (255 value) color scheme and calculate a color value for every state. Would that be the right approach?
Thanks,
Sachin
