cartography

In our last few articles, we've looked at some free desktop-based applications that nonprofit staff can use to create choropleths and cartograms, two specific types of maps.  These desktop tools, while they can be free and powerful, aren't always user-friendly and many nonprofits don't have the necessary underlying datafiles to use them properly.

In last week's article about cartograms, we discussed one type of thematic map (a map that displays a theme, such as poverty statistics or disease infection rates).  This week, we'll look at some free programs to make choropleths - thematic maps that preserve distance and shape, but use colors or patterns to differentiate between different regions with different values.