The downside to doing the reprojection is that you don’t get the benefit of those underlying Mapbox tiles, like roads and boundaries and city names etc. So everything that we wanted in the map, we had to run through that same reprojection script. We had to make a state boundaries layer and a cities layer, and then put in some roads, and then felt like that was enough.

Did you use any other tools to achieve this visualization?

R to do the initial spatial smoothing, and we used mapshaper to do a lot of the pre-processing of all of these different shapefiles. I used mapshaper a lot. And then Tippecanoe to generate the tiles and upload them to the Mapbox server.

If you had to do this without Mapbox or before Mapbox, would it have been possible?

I’m sure that with the help of some other graphics editors here, we would’ve been able to do it. I would not have been able to do it without additional help from other people, just because I don’t know how to do a lot of the things that it would have involved. We did the baseball fan maps five years ago, and I was looking at those maps as we were developing this one and remembering what that process was like. And it was, I would say, significantly more involved in terms of just generating the tiles and that whole process.