Cartography

Inspired by ITHOM, I have generated my own map of places I've visited. Rather interesting, I must say - almost entirely northern hemisphere...

(Click here to make your own...)

The whole idea of map-making has therefore come to mind. It goes almost without saying that the "projection of the map" is not only that imposed from outside by the cartographer, but also that information which is projected by the map...the way in which any given map is constructed has enormous consequences for our perception of the information contained therein. To site the UK in the centre may be practical, given its status as the home of zero degrees longitude, but also (therfore, and of course) reminds one of the very history of Greenwich's occupation of that privileged position: the days when so much of the world was pink, when the sun never set on the British Empire.

The Peters projection in some ways rectifies the distortion of the sizes of landmasses that is created by the traditional World Map, the Mercator projection.... The Mercator represents shape more or less accurately, but distorts relative size as its compromise. Peters' projection represents the opposite problem - a distortion of shape at the expense of accuracy of size. Cartographers refer to this dilemma as The Greenland Problem. In the Mercator, Greenland looks roughly the same size as Africa, but the Peters demonstrates something closer to the truth, namely that Africa is in fact 14 times the size of Greenland. The Peters projection is readily available, and circulates in some circles of map-users, but the image that we all remember from school, and that our children will no doubt remember, is more like the Mercator (albeit rather less pink). It's all a matter of perspective, in so many ways...

And still, in both the Peters and the Mercator, the picture is still anchored by zero degrees. The pink map above shows the problem most clearly: Britain is quite literally the centre of the picture (well, just above the centre, in accordance with our habit in the west of reading from top to bottom...it's at a nice, comfortable place for finding Home...). Peters is slightly less biased in this respect, but even so...And we still have the northern hemisphere at the top. How discomforted we would feel if we were to open an atlas one day and see this:

Even saving it to my hard drive from its location on the web, the file is named "Upside-down map". Just double check it - it's not all upside down... the text is all the right way up. It's just got the southern hemisphere at the top.

But it's these maps that I found most interesting. Worldmapper is, in the site's own words, "a collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest." So, there's one according to land area, which looks kinda what you normally see on a world map. Then you get this, where the territories are sized according to the proportion of illiterate young women:

Such maps as these are, in my opinion, a stroke of genius. It's quite a different picture from those where the Mercator projection is simply coloured in different shades according to a key...we can too easily gloss over the implications of those maps. But Worldmapper has achieved something altogether else...it seems that size over colour is what has the effect here. But, quite probably, that's precisely because we're so very used to the sizes imprinted in our brains by Mercator.