Category Archives: maps

The Human Shape of the Planet

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Remember those insect posters from the biology lessons at school? Butterflies, bugs and spiders assembled in a mosaic-style depiction that shows the diversity of these species in nature. The resemblance with insects was also one widespread reaction to the gridded population cartograms when the online world population atlas was released:

At first glance they could be mistaken for distorted creepy-crawlies – bloated body parts with randomly placed antennae and spindly legs, their gridlines looking much like the compound eyes and variegated wings of an insect.
(Source: BBC News Magazine)

The diversity of the population distribution in the countries of the world is reflected in these population maps. The atlas creates a unique perspective of the human shape of the planet. Taking their analogy to these good old insect posters into account, I have created two mosaics in a similar style that assemble all maps from the world population atlas. They portrait the diversity of our world and give a new perspective on the shape of humanity. This is how the insect poster of the humanity looks like:

The Human Shape of the World: The World Population Atlas
(click for larger map)

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Urban development in the city of Cologne (Köln)

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Mapping Cologne
In a previous post on this website I looked at urban mapping showing population changes in London. This time I dug up a different example for mapping cities from my map archive: The German city of Cologne (Köln) is one of Germany’s largest cities with a total population of approximately 1 million people. It its over 2000 years lasting history, its urban landscape changed considerably, and since the Prussian times in the 19th century fairly good mapping records cover the modern land use change from the pre-industrialised to the post-modern city. In a GIS mapping project some years ago, these changes have been digitized in full detail from some major topographic maps, covering the changes in the urban land use since 1850 (see bottom image of this page for the legend to this animation):

Map animation of the Land Use Change in the German city of Cologne / Köln

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World Malaria Day

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The term ‘malaria’ comes from the medieval Italian ‘mala aria’ meaning ‘bad air’. The term was coined at a time before the mosquito had been identified as the carrier of the parasite. (Worldmapper)

April 25 is World Malaria Day which raises awareness for a still prevalent disease. While some significant efforts could be made to come closer towards the goal of eradicating Malaria-related deaths until 2015, still an estimated 800,000 people die every year from the disease according to the World Malaria Report 2010. According to UNICEF, Malaria is the third single biggest killer of Children globally, and about 90% of these deaths occur in Africa. One in six of the
In collaboration with UNICEF I have worked on an updated version of the Worldmapper Malaria Death map, using the WHO report and UNICEF figures to visualise the distribution of Malaria-related deaths. The figures were also added to the Guardian Datastore which also has more information about Malaria cases in general and the collection of such data.
The resulting map shows the distribution of recorded deaths that were attributed to Malaria, and it shows the ongoing dominance of Malaria being a lethal problem on the African continent:
World Malaria Death Map
The UNICEF Press Release adds this information: Continue reading →

Walking Dead: Capital Punishment

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Amnesty International has recently released their latest report on executions and sentences around the world during 2010 (pdf) stating that ” it is clear that countries using the death penalty are now increasingly isolated” (see also here, the underlying data has also been added to the Guardian Datastore).
The following two maps show a worldmapper-style view of the state of death penalty using figures from the time of 2007 to 2010 out of the above mentioned sources. There are two pictures that can be drawn from the data: The first map shows the countries of the world resized according to the total death penalty sentences recorded there in that time period (the map inset shows the state of death penalty around the world on a conventional map). The second map visualises the actually executed death penalties from 2007-2010 by resizing the countries accordingly (the map inset here shows a world population cartogram that allows a comparison of the main map with the actual population distribution).
In both maps the figures for China are uncertain and estimated to be in the thousands. China has been set to 1000 in both maps and may thus appear much smaller than it actually is related to this topic.
The two maps with their very distorted shape of the world show how divided the world is in this topic. Very few countries dominate the map while the majority of countries disappear completely. Europe and South America are literally eradicated, and when looking at the actually executed death penalties in the second map, even more countries vanish:

Cartogram / Map of the Death Penalty Prosecutions worldwide 2007-2010
(click for larger map)
Cartogram / Map of the Death Penalty Executions worldwide 2007-2010
(click for larger map)

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In Focus: US midterm elections 2010

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Political InsightA map showing the US midterm elections results is now featured in the “In Focus” section of Political Insight (April 2011, Volume 2, Issue 1). The accompanying article written by Charles Pattie, Danny Dorling and me looks at the implications of the election results.

Here are the bibliographic details:
US Midterm Elections 2010 Thumbnail image

  • Pattie, C. Hennig, B. D. and Dorling, D. (2011). In Focus: US Midterm Elections 2010. Political Insight2 (1): 34.
    Article online (Wiley)

More electoral maps can be found here.

The content on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig. Please contact me for further details on the terms of use.

Counting the US population

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Around the world countries are counting their people in the national censuses. The world’s largest country China aims to chart its shifting population, so does the second largest nation India (who also just released their latest tiger census results), Germany takes a deeper look into its shrinking population for the first time since 1987, while the United Kingdom looks at its still growing population. These are just some of the example for the currently ongoing latest rounds of censuses around the world which will also lead to significant updates of global socioeconomic data which has been used for the realisation of the worldmapper project.
The USA is one of the first countries to have completed their latest 2010 census and recently started publishing the figures from last year’s population count. Among the first numbers released are the population counts, which draw the most up-to-date picture of the US population distribution and does also allow to analyse the changes since the last census took place in 2000. The following map uses these figures and shows the US population in cartogram form based on the state level figures. The main map shows each state resized according to the total number of people living there, and colours the states by their relative change (in percent) compared to the 2000 population. The upper left map inset shows the same map, colouring the states by their total population changes in that 10 year period. The bottom right map inset resizes the states according to the total population changes that took place between 2000 and 2010, and colours the relative change on top of that:

Population Map / Cartogram the USA
(click for larger map)

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