Telling an Old Story with New Maps - Geographic Visualization: Concepts, Tools and Applications - page 67

Telling an Old Story
with New Maps

Anna Barford and Danny Dorling
Department of Geography, University of Sheffield

5.1 Introduction: re-visualizing our world

This is an unusual chapter - it presents a story through maps. The story comes from a
project that made 366 world maps of different variables in the year 2006. The project
was undertaken by the Social and Spatial Inequalities group based in the Department of
Geography at the University of Sheffield in collaboration with Mark Newman, a physicist
working at the University of Michigan. All the maps that are shown here are available for
free on our website: www.worldmapper.org.
Maps of the world are powerful tools in shaping how we think of the world; the word
'imagine' is primarily concerned with images and pictures. When we imagine the world it
is likely that a map comes to mind, or maybe the earthrise photograph taken on the Apollo
8 mission in 1968. Visualizing the world according to the size of land masses is currently a
popular image. Yet there are an infinite number of subjects, relating to how people live in
the world, which could be represented by a world map. We (all of us that is, not just the
authors) are lucky enough to now have data available to map some of these. Almost none
of the data shown here were available worldwide in, say, 1968.
Below is a description of how, using world data, one can change the sizes of territories
to show distributions of variables. Using this technique with colleagues, we have created
hundreds of apparently distorted world maps. To try to explain why we have done this,
the remainder of this chapter is made up of a story that not only concerns the connections
between people shown on the same map, but also the connections between what is shown
in different maps.