The use of cartograms as representational tools for the US election results got a lot of attention last week, with links to a number of sites such as Mark Newman’s .

Cartograms are powerful cartographic visualizations, but are not necessarily easy to produce. I remember having to run a very tempermental ArcView script to generate some cartograms for a Digital Cartography class project. Our reader Ed sent me a link to a great free Java software tool developed by the Choros Laboratory of Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland, ScapeToad, that you can use to generate your own cartograms.