The American Population - Visualized (as a dotmap)

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Brandon Martin-Anderson does the heavy lifting, mapping every single person counted in the 2010 census. Thats 308,450,225 dots (technical term - "a lot of dots").  The image above is just that - an image.  Go to the source to see the actual - interactive - visualization.
From the source

What's all this?

This is a map of every person counted by the 2010 US Census. The map has 308,450,225 dots - one for each person.

Why?

I wanted an image of human settlement patterns unmediated by proxies like city boundaries, arterial roads, state lines, &c. Also, it was an interesting challenge.

Who is responsible for this?

The US Census, mostly. I made the map. I'm Brandon Martin-Anderson.Kieran Huggins came to the rescue with spare server capacity and technical advice after this got Boing Boing'd.

How?

I wrote a Python script to generate points from US Census block-level counts, and then generated the tiles with Processing. Here's more detail for the interested.

The census actually counted 308,745,538 people.

Yeah, I don't know. Puerto Rico? The military?

I don't see dots. I see smudges.

The dots are very small. Try zooming in.

Nobody lives in Central Park/Pier 12/County Lockup/Abandoned Themepark.

The 2010 Census reported that someone lived there.

 

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