Map of the Week-Cotton Pickin' Democrats!

Yes these images have made the rounds of many other map blogs and yes I was supposedly done with Election 2008 but this is interesting. In my November 5th post I alluded to the county patterns and the possible race factor among others. Now we have courtesy of Allen Gathman from Southeast Missouri State University (Go Redhawks!) an explanation. He compared an 1860 map of cotton production to the pattern of southern counties that voted for Obama on this page. The Strangemaps blog took this a step further and actually overlaid the two maps. Each dot from the 1860 map represents 2000 bales of cotton.



There is the obvious racial component as the cotton belt counties have a higher concentration of African Americans. However, the Vigorous North blog takes this even another step beyond to show how the shallow ocean waters of the Cretaceous Period influenced the soil types and thus the suitability for cotton and thus the racial settlement patterns and thus the election results in the cotton belt counties.

Map of the Week-Strolling Baby Through Weird Alternate Realities

Here's a delightfully odd marketing strategy. Bugaboo strollers (right) has enlisted some avant-garde artists to make a series of day trip maps for cities in Europe, North America and Australia. They have points of interest you can click on to get more info. Apparently "third world" places such as Asia, Africa and Philadelphia don't rate with them.

One of the more interesting ones is Mina Monnee's Portland. I especially like how she wrapped the river around it.



I also like Prague by Dustin Arnold.

Robert Nakata has some of the most "artistic". Here are his renderings of Toronto and Brighton (England)

Map of the Week addendum

Here is a nice Election 2008 cartogram that goes by county. I found it on this site. There's a more red/blue version but I like the purple gradations - it makes us seem less divided for what that's worth.
Unfortunately it's missing two states.
Watch out! The San Francisco Bay area is trying to escape!


And here's the same map geographically.

Map of the Week-Dissecting the States

We've probably all seen some version of this map by now:

What's interesting is when you drill down into the states and get the county patterns. The New York Times maps allow you to do this. Aside from the usual urban-rural dichotomy much of the patterns can be explained by ethnicity, race and income. I could speculate about these states but I'd rather just enjoy them as is.