Sunday, March 17, 2013

French Kissing, Revisited

My eight-year-old niece just asked me how many times people in France kiss each other when they say hello. I remembered a fun web-survey project from a few years ago, but I thought that the maps shown on the web simplified the data too much, with each administrative département shaded a solid color — the tyranny of the majority! So I did a quick redesign using the same data, and voilà, we can now see the regionality of French greetings with much more nuance.

The sensibility here is similar to my other dot maps, but by doing a bit of math I found a way for ArcGIS to make smooth pointilist color mixes. The result is a hybrid of dot map and choropleth that seems quite promising for this kind of discrete data.