New York is the host city to this year’s AAG Annual Meeting. For my plenary presentation at the Population Specialty Group session I therefore decided to add a little bit of a local touch to the talk by including a new map of New York City in the slides. Continue reading
A Lonely Planet
‘How to Land a Jumbo Jet’ is the catchy title of a little book published by Lonely Planet a couple of month ago. The book is a “visual exploration of travel facts, figures and ephemera” and a “visual guide to the way we live, travel and inhabit the globe”. Edited by the British graphic designer Nigel Holmes, the book follows the increased interest in information graphics that started to flourish yet again with the increasing availability of ever growing amounts of data. Continue reading
British News of the World 2011
According to the British Guardian, 2011 was the year of the news overload, with many people perceiving the year’s news from around the world being extremely significant in manifold ways. “There is no news“, as reportedly broadcast by the BBC an a day in 1930, is an unlikely in our media age, but whether last year’s news were more significant than usual remains another question. It may just as well be a proof of an increasingly connected world where news become ever more instant and people demand new news virtually every second – the news overload of 2011 may therefore also be a result of the overload of news produced by the media (and demanded by the population). Continue reading
In Focus: America’s Debt to the World
Amid Europe’s debt crisis it remains less noticed that the largest mountain of debt in the world is piled up across the big pond in the United States of America. The topic will be critically debated in US politics as presidential elections are due in 2012. In an article for the “In Focus” section of Political Insight (December 2011, Volume 2, Issue 3) Danny Dorling and I took a closer look at the foreign liabilities of America’s debt.
The map we created for this feature is a cartogram with the world’s countries resized according to the total amount of US treasury securities that are held in each country (as shown in data from July 2011). This is a preview of the maps that we created for the article:
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London in Maps
London 2012 means a busy year for the British capital. Not only are the 2012 Olympics coming up, but also will London be part of the Diamond Jubilee celebrations, and on the more serious side, the current economic crisis will continue to have considerable impact on the people living in a city that is heavily reliant on the global financial markets. Although London is “by far the richest part of Britain and the engine of the national economy [, yet] it also has the highest rates of poverty and inequality” (more on these issues are highlighted in the latest release of London’s Poverty Profile). In the dawn of all these events, Londoners are also electing a new mayor and assembly to decide whom they want to see in the driving seat for the next four years.
The world of cartography and maps is paying its own contribution to this city with the London Mapping Festival. Continue reading
Material flows: Global resource extraction
Climate change as discussed at the climate talks in Durban is just one of the complex impact that humans have on the natural environment. The history of humanity is closely linked to benefiting from (or exploiting) the natural environment in order to improve living conditions. “Stone, Iron, Bronze and Steel Ages – the names of these periods have been chosen according to the main materials in use” Continue reading