A New Dashboard Visual: Hex Maps
The Congressional District Health Dashboard is committed to providing user-friendly tools that aid users’ interpretation and understanding of data, like data visualizations. The Dashboard’s Metric Maps offer users a national map, allowing a congressional district-level view of health and its drivers that users can easily attribute to recognizable geographies.
To explore more dense areas, users can zoom in and pan across the map. However, for users interested in a national perspective on data, this map has limitations. Congressional districts are drawn to split the population evenly, in part, to include (roughly) similar numbers of people. For instance, CDs in Montana are large because the population is more widely spread out in that state. Districts in big cities with very high concentrations of people, like New York City or Los Angeles, are geographically small and virtually invisible on the national congressional district map. To help users get a better sense of the national variation for a given metric, we’ve added another option for how to view congressional districts: hex maps.
What are Hex Maps?
Hex maps show each unit – each congressional district – as being the same size. As illustrated below, a hex map offers a way for users to see a visual representation of every congressional district across the country, making it easier for users interested in visualizing national patterns independently of the geographic size of congressional districts. On the website, users can hover on the hexagons to see the district name and associated estimate for the metric of interest. For instance, on the hex map North Dakota’s At-Large congressional district (with a population size of approximately 785,000) is represented by a hex that is the same size as each of the CDs representing Chicago residents, each of which represent approximately 750,000 people.
Why is the Dashboard including Hex Maps?
The Dashboard already uses hex maps for its District Density Scale. On a hex map, the geographic size of a district does not matter; all districts are represented by an icon (a hexagon, or hex) that is the exact same size. Hex maps facilitate comparisons between districts (e.g., diabetes rates in Alabama’s 3rd vs. Arizona’s 1st) of varying geographic sizes. This new mapping option provides insight into health and measures of health nationwide, as well as another perspective for understanding regional variations in health and its drivers.
Where to Begin
We encourage you to start exploring the Congressional District Health Dashboard’s new hex maps feature! You can access hex maps from the national metric map (not from the state or district maps). From there, you’ll see an option to switch to Hex Map view. You can hover over different districts to explore regional patterns on the national CD map.
We hope hex maps allow all our users – policymakers, journalists, students, and others - to observe differences between CDs in a clear and accessible way.
If you have questions or comments about hex maps on the Congressional Health District Dashboard, please don't hesitate to reach out to our team at [email protected].
