Maps of Top X

Some years ago, maps of Top X came into fashion. The example above is lifted from Visual Cinnamon's Webby Award nominee (and co-winner). This is just one chart from their massive project. See here for my short reviews of all nominees.The most common version of maps of Top X is the map of Top 1. Using the tile map as the base, Visual Cinnamon displays every state as a circle of equal size. The tile map condones distortion of areas as well as of relative positions. The project concerns bird-watching. Each state is represented by its #1 Googled bird. At a glance, we can see that Bald Eagle (yellow) and Northern Cardinal (red) dominate Google searches. There are only seven states in which neither of these two birds came first.Maps of Top 1 dump most of the data. It doesn't differentiate between states in which residents split their attention across a large variety of birds, and states in which residents are obsessed with a small number of birds.To show what's possible, I made some maps of…