Telling an Old Story with New Maps - Geographic Visualization: Concepts, Tools and Applications - page 107

probably connected. Often our ideas about the world are based primarily on more nebulous
material that might include stereotypes, news reports and personal accounts. These maps
add to that and our imaginations of the world because, rather than picking a few stories of
interest, they attempt to find a space for everyone living in the world. We started this essay
by quoting Rosa Luxemberg, who strove to improve the world, rather than excusing herself
with beliefs about what is inevitable, or the idea that she was too small to make a difference
(much like others who are now heroes and heroines of history topics). Rosa argued that we
should challenge the smoke-screens that can conceal what is happening. Towards this aim
maps can be a useful tool as just a small part of the process of revealing what some have
known for a long time: 'All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is
at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with
his kind' (Section I of the Communist Manifesto, 1848). In other words how you thought
the world is ain't necessarily so. Hopefully, through this project, we have begun to show that
there are thousands of different ways of looking at this planet and its people.
References
Communist Manifesto (1848) Section 1, Bourgeois and Proletarians . Available at: http://en.
wikipedia.org/wiki/The Communist Manifesto
Dorling, D. and Thomas, B. (2004) People and Places . Bristol, Policy Press.
Fanon, F. (2001) The Wretched of the Earth . London, Penguin.
Gastner, M. T. and Newman M. E. J. (2004) Diffusion-based method for producing density
equalizing maps. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 101: 7499-7504.
Gordon, D. (2004) Eradicating Poverty in the 21st Century: When will Social Justice be
done? Inaugural lecture given by Professor Dave Gordon on 18 October 2004. Available
at: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/poverty/child%20poverty.html#inaugural
Kasser, T. (2002) The High Price of Materialism . Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.
Kidron, M. and Segal, R. (1981) The State of the World Atlas. London, Pluto Press.
Luxemberg, R. (1871-1919), quotation cited in Wallerstein, I. (2003) The Decline of American
Power . London, The New Press, pp. 43-44.
Randerson, J. (2006) World's richest 1% own 40% of all wealth, UN report discovers. The
Guardian , 6 December 2006, p. 24.
Smith, D. and Bræin, A. (2004) The State of the World Atlas . London, Earthscan.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) Sourced on 14 January 2007 from the UN website:
http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html