Last night I gave a talk at geomobLDN about the carbon map project. Here are a few relevant links and tidbits.
The diffusion algorithm for generating area cartograms is due to Michael Gastner and Mark Newman. I used Mark Newman’s Cart software to perform the algorithm.
During the talk I showed a video of the the diffusion process. The initial distribution of ink in this video corresponds to the distribution of the world’s population according to the World Bank’s SP.POP.TOTL.
The video was generated by using an instrumented version of Cart to dump intermediate density grids during the course of the simulation, and then plotting the density grids using this script. The images were finally stitched together into a video using ffmpeg.
With the progression of the borders overlain on it (and at half the frame rate), it looks like this:
The border overlays were added using this script.
I have also added a README file to my cartogram preparation code, to give some pointers as to how it is intended to be used.
Bosker Blog 