Kinda confused, using a map to represent land area, then the colored hex locations are not corresponding to the land use they indicate.
I get it, some of the hexes are 'all over', like solar. Can't put that one hex any one place. Just remarking that it gave me pause - mixing land-use-geography with ... geography. Without being correlated in any way.
ends up obscuring the relationships between quantities
It can end up obscuring relationships between quantities internal to the visualization, but at the same time having this kind of visualization can help tie the internal quantities to external quantities known to the reader. E.g. "4% of land mass of Netherlands" may not mean much to someone, but if they can see it visualized on a map like this can help them recognize that it's equivalent to e.g. "this county I'm living in".
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Nice!
Kinda confused, using a map to represent land area, then the colored hex locations are not corresponding to the land use they indicate.
I get it, some of the hexes are 'all over', like solar. Can't put that one hex any one place. Just remarking that it gave me pause - mixing land-use-geography with ... geography. Without being correlated in any way.
It is really strange and ends up obscuring the relationships between quantities.
It is a pretty visualization that unfortunately fails its primary purpose.
I would recommend to the author the book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte.
It can end up obscuring relationships between quantities internal to the visualization, but at the same time having this kind of visualization can help tie the internal quantities to external quantities known to the reader. E.g. "4% of land mass of Netherlands" may not mean much to someone, but if they can see it visualized on a map like this can help them recognize that it's equivalent to e.g. "this county I'm living in".
A treemap would probably be the better choice. The Swiss government uses one to visualize their land use: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/territory-en...