The CIA also has a Flickr account, where they’ve posted a number of their maps in various albums sorted by decade (all of which are labelled “Cartography Maps,” which sounds dumb until you realize they probably mean Cartography Center Maps). I think the Cartography Tools album is even more interesting than the maps.
The white underlying geographic map places states in their familiar size, shape and location, allowing them to be identified quickly. Using a cluster of dots rather than a solid fill to represent the outcome ensures that the amount of red and blue on the map accurately reflects states’ weight in the election outcome, rather than the (irrelevant) surface area.
Like the tiled grid cartogram, the number of electoral votes in each state is easy to compare visually without counting or interpreting numbers printed on the map. Because each electoral vote is a discrete mark, it is possible to accurately represent the split electoral votes that are possible in Maine and Nebraska, or the possibility of a faithless elector.
Japan’s Good Design Awards have been announced for 2016, and the Grand Award has gone to an unusual map. The AuthaGraph World Map “is made by equally dividing a spherical surface into 96 triangles, transferring it to a tetrahedron while maintaining areas proportions and unfolding it to be a rectangle.” Follow that? Sphere to tetrahedron to rectangle.
The brainchild of designer Hajime Narukawa, the AuthaGraph map was first released in 2010. What’s it for? In many ways it’s sort of a Japanese Peters projection: it aims to maintain the relative sizes of the continents. From the page selling the map outside Japan:
Every world map that has been invented since the Mercator Projection was first revealed in 1569 can be divided into two groups. One group fits the world into a rectangle by distorting the continents. The other group corrects the distortion, but at the cost of the rectangular shape. This is what drove Narukawa to create a map which is rectangular like the Mercator Projection map, and yet correctly projects the continents like the Dyxmaxion Map (revealed in 1946).
Today, print subscribers to the New York Times were treated to a fold-out map showing a choropleth map of the 2012 election results at the ZIP code level (above). “The map is part of a special election section that aims to help explain the political geography of the United States — identifying where people who are conservative and liberal live and pointing out how physical boundaries, like the Rio Grande and the Cascade Mountains, often align with political ones,” writes the Times’s Alicia Parlapiano.
Parlapiano’s piece is in fact a lengthy tutorial on how to read election maps, along the lines of the pages I linked to in last week’s post on election map cartography—it outlines the problems of state-level election maps and choropleth maps that privilege area over population, for example, and shows some other ways of depicting the results.
I can only conclude that both the Times and the Post are making efforts to educate their readers before the election results start coming in, one week from tonight. (Deep breath.)
With less than two weeks before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, it’s time for a refresher on election map cartography, particularly in the context of U.S. presidential elections.
Cartograms
2012 U.S. presidential results. At right, a cartogram scaled by electoral vote. Maps by Mark Newman.
Let’s start with the basics: at All Over the Map, Greg Miller explains the problem with U.S. presidential election maps—big states with few electoral votes look more important than smaller states with more votes—and introduces the idea of the cartogram: a map distorted to account for some variable other than land area.
The map may not look advanced today, but in 1883 it broke new ground by enabling Americans to visualize the spatial dynamics of political power. Readers responded enthusiastically. One reviewer pointed to the Republican counties in Arkansas—something left invisible on a map of the Electoral College returns—and wondered what other oddities of geography and history might be uncovered when election returns were more systematically measured. In other words, the map revealed spatial patterns and relationships that might otherwise remain hidden, or only known anecdotally. Perhaps its no coincidence that at the same time the two parties began to launch more coordinated, disciplined, nationwide campaigns, creating a system of two-party rule that we have lived with ever since.
(This map also inverts the modern colours for the two main U.S. political parties: here the Democrats are red and the Republicans are blue. Those colours were standardized only fairly recently.) [Geolounge]
For other ways of mapping election results, see this gallery of thematic maps, which includes things like 3D choropleth maps, dot density maps, and all kinds of variations on cartograms and choropleth maps. There’s more than one way to map an election. [Andy Woodruff]
Alan Smith of the Financial Times adds to the conversation about when to use a map to present your data, when not to—he gives an example where a gridded infographic is a much better choice than a map—and when more than one map is required to tell the whole story. “So as lovers of maps, we are keen to create beautiful ones whenever they offer a crucial addition. Truly appreciating them, however, means not defaulting to a map just because you can. Like a lot of things in the world of data visualisation, the right way to use them is to follow the mantra ‘fewer, but better’.” [WMS]
Map Men is a YouTube series by comedians Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones. It’s funny as hell, and quite informative too: it’s two silly people being very smart about often-silly cartographical situations. Six episodes so far; I hope they make more. [Geographical]
In a June 2015 piece for Al Jazeera America, history Ph.D. candidate Nick Danforth offered a contrarian opinion piece in defence of the Mercator projection. The usual (i.e. Peters) critique of the Mercator is that it emphasizes northern countries at the expense of equatorial countries. Danforth questions the premise behind that critique:
I first sided with the Mercator against its critics when, on one of the rare occasions I thought about Greenland, I realized just how rarely I thought about Greenland. Despite seeing it hanging there like a giant icy sword of Damocles atop every wall map, we just don’t seem to care about it. Antarctica, too, is massively inflated on the Mercator, to the point that it’s as big around as the entire earth. But few would argue that mapmakers intended to depict it as a superpower. Meanwhile, if maps lead us to ignore Africa, they should also lead us to treat cartographically bloated Canada as one of the most important countries in the world. We don’t.
He goes on to argue that if the Mercator projection was a reflection of European power, Africa would have been emphasized, not minimized.
Of all the problems with criticizing the way our maps depict Africa, the most ironic is that it ignores the continent’s history of colonialism. Consider the motives of a colonial-era British cartographer—perhaps the kind of guy who made this bold, colorful propaganda map […] showing off the queen’s dominions.
His incentive, if anything, would have been to make Africa appear as large as possible, since Britain then ruled a large share of it. With India along the same latitude, expanding the size of the earth’s equatorial region would have been a perfect way to color more of the map imperial pink.
Jill Elizabeth Desimini, a professor of landscape design at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, argues for a more holistic approach to mapmaking in the digital age. The prevalence of Google Maps, an extremely functional and useful tool, can limit the scope of what we think a map can do, and just how much design can impact its effectiveness and communication potential. As users are presented with maps that contain more and more information, they tend to depend on them and their directions, she says, and lose their critical eye. As cartography moves toward non-physical things, such as check-ins, and abstract forces, Cartographic Grounds raises the question of geographic precision and just what it means to map well.
Esri has announced the results of their 2016 Map Gallery competition. The top three maps in a number of different categories are posted on this page. Nearly 700 maps were submitted for the contest by attendees at last month’s Esri User Conference. [Esri]
This book can be read at two scales. Narrowly, it is a history of the mapping sciences in the twentieth century that situates technologies like GPS within a longer trajectory of spatial knowledge. But more expansively, by connecting geographic knowledge to territorial politics and new ways of navigating the world, it is also a political and cultural history of geographic space itself.
