Yearly Archives: 2010

In Focus: The General Election 2010

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Political InsightA map showing the detailed results of this year’s General Election in Great Britain is now featured in the “In Focus” section of Political Insight journal (September 2010, Volume 1, Issue 2). The accompanying article written by Danny Dorling and me includes a brief analysis of the swings in the new Parliament at Westminster.

Here are the bibliographic details:
Election Map 2010 Thumbnail image

  • Dorling, D. and Hennig, B. D. (2010). In Focus: General Election 2010. Political Insight1 (2): 72.
    Article online (Wiley)

More election 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.

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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Pakistan’s Population

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The monsoon rain has left a wide range of Pakistan‘s populated regions flooded. Especially the floodplains surrounding the River Indus are severly affected, as images of the Smos satellite show. Also other satellites, such as TerraSAR-X and the recently launched TanDEM-X support emergency response for the slowly growing international aid. These technologies are useful for location-related information, but to fully understand the dimension of the floods, it helps to have a closer look at the population distribution. The following gridded population cartogram (an enhanced version from the world population atlas) draws a picture of where people live in Pakistan. The underlying elevation information allows to understand the topography and the Indus is included for better orientation. The map shows that beyond the urban centres of the largest cities (labelled), much of the about 170 million people in the country are living along the rivers and in the floodplains while the Eastern and Southeastern regions remain less populated:

Pakistan Population Map
(click for larger map)

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A brief look at map projections

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Each and every map represents a distorted view of reality. Therefore, cartograms are not as unusual as they might appear at a first glance. Map projections are a central aspect of the Worldmapper project because the maps (respectively cartograms) featured in the project are basically not different from some sort of re-projection of the world, albeit in a different way than conventional projections used in cartography. Rather than trying to solve the conflicts of distortion when drawing a three dimensional surface on to a two dimensional area (be it a screen or a paper map), the worldmapper cartograms distort our image of the world on purpose and show each country in proportion to a specific topic. This is reason enough to reflect a little bit on what map projections are and in what way they create a distorted view of the world.

Worldmapper map using different projections

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Money

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Financial meltdown, recovery, inequality, injustice. Doom and gloom everywhere. But the world has been a strange place before, and it is very much about money. The following music video assembles a showcase of worldmapper maps to the lyrics and music of Money, a song by N.A.S.A. feat. David Byrne, Chuck D, Ras Congo, Seu Jorge & Z-Trip:

Money – Worldmapper Edition

There is a HD version available on YouTube, where you can also access the full accompanying lyrics as subtitles.

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

2010 Worldcup goals map

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Red and yellow dominated the final match of the worldcup with a remarkable 14 cards in these colours shown in the 120 minutes, and red-yellow eventually also taking the trophy, just as Paul predicted. One goal was enough for Spain, demonstrating once again their efficiency: Spain scored 8 of the tournament’s 145 goals in their seven matches to the title. The following map shows, how the nations compare in terms of goals – from Germany’s 16 (with Thomas Müller taking the Golden Boot) to Algeria’s. The second maps in contrast shows all goals conceded, from North Korea’s unfortunate 12 to Portugal and Switzerland’s 1:

All 2010 Worldcup goals on a map(click map for a larger view)

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