Tag Archives: presentation

People powered maps: Geovisualisierung im Zeitalter der Globalisierung

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Unlike the post-apocalyptic scenario in infamous Waterworld, what would a world without oceans look like? An oceanless world, so to say, but not like one of the supercontinents that we already had. Instead, more like our today’s continents in the shape of the living space of humankind. In the digital era of cartography, this kind of map is just a few clicks (and much processing time) away, and results in this map curiosity: The World as an oceanless population planet:

gridded population cartogram of an oceanless world
(click for larger version)

The map has been created as a little odd piece of map art to tease my talk at the DGfK‘s (German Cartographic Society) colloquium at the University of Applied Sciences in Karlsruhe today (update: a German summary can be found here).
As it was all about visualisation (and maps, of course), I used the Prezi presentation tool to visualise this talk. Here it is:

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Magnificent Maps: Changing Perspectives

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Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art is an exhibition showing “80 of the largest, most impressive and beautiful maps ever made, from 200 AD to the present day”. The free exhibition still goes until 19 September 2010 at the The British Library in London.

The following map has been shown by Danny Dorling in one of the accompanying events. The lecture Changing perspectives: mapping global injustice by changing the view? introduced a series of maps using the gridded cartogram technique, some of which were shown to a wider audience for the first time. This map is a reprojection of the world according to the population distribution based on an equally distributed grid. The grid size in this map equals a 0.25° raster on a conventional map and a composite satellite raster image of the world has been transformed accordingly, so that the map reflects the population distribution in relation to the landscapes on which people are living:

Composite satellite image projected on a gridded world population cartogram
(click for larger view)

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The Real World at Night

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The night view of the earth has become a very popular depiction of this planet. Although the NASA itself says that “The brightest areas of the Earth are the most urbanized, but not necessarily the most populated” many people mistake this view as a representation of the inhabited places on the globe. Our gridded population cartogram can help to get a better understanding of the relation of people and light. The following map is a reprojection of the earth at night that shows the nightview in relation to the population distribution. The gridlines are kept in a light colour and thus allow to identify those areas where the lines converge (representing the unpopulated regions). In contrast, the populated areas are given the most space, so that one can easily see which populated areas are literally illuminated at night – and where there are people living in darkness. The resulting map is an impressive picture of an unequal world, with large parts of Africa living in darkness, and the affluent countries in Europe and North America glowing in the dark:

The Earth at Night projected on a gridded population cartogram(click for large image)

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A population-centric map projection

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Here is some material from a presentation at this year’s  AAG Annual Conference in Washington DC. The presentation People powered maps: A population-centric map projection was given in the session on Topics in GIS, Remote Sensing, and Spatial Analysis and showed some new works on our grid-based cartograms (as presented at GISRUK 2009 and ESRI UC 2009).
The following animation shows the transformation of a topographic map of the United States, ending in a grid-based population cartogram (and then reversing). Please notice that loading the animation takes a while on slower internet connections:

USA Animated Population Cartogram with Topography
(click for larger view)

This is the full presentation given at the AAG Meeting. Please note that the animated parts such as the above animation are not shown in this Slideshare version:

Making visible global injustice in health

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Danny Dorling presented some worldmapper maps at his keynote of this year’s Medsin Global Health Conference in Newcastle. The presentation can be viewed on Slideshare, although the fully animated slides are better visible in the original Powerpoint file, which is available for download here: http://sheffield.ac.uk/geography/staff/dorling_danny/lectures.html. An audio-added Flash version of the talk is now available, too (see here: http://sasi.group.shef.ac.uk/presentations/mappingdeaths/).