Changing times was the title of a session at this year’s Annual Symposium of the British Cartographic Society (not to be confused with the Society of Cartographers which will have its annual conference in September).
My contribution as a speaker in this session was titled Changing views of a changing planet. In the presentation I took a look at how changes in data and technology can provide alternative ways of mapping a globalised world, and mapping cities as the hotspots of globalisation. Most of the examples in the slides came from our recent work on a social atlas of London, which I embedded in the wider context of how cartograms can be used at varying scales and with different approaches to fully reflect the complex realities of the complex and diverse realities of our age. This is the Slideshare version of my slides:
Unfortunately Slideshare does not allow the integration of animated elements in a presentation, which is why the above slides do not include an animated version of the gridded population cartogram that I also showed to the delegates in my presentation. Below is the animation that I showed at the symposium. It is a rather old version that I created from the early gridded cartograms that I made for demonstrational purposes (lacking some proper design). The animated map shows a transformation of Great Britain turning from a conventional map display into a gridded population cartogram (one that can be seen in a more detailed static version here). Some rivers and major roads have been included in the transformation, as well as the topography and a light indication of the grid cells that determine the transformation:
A similar transformation for the USA can be seen in a contribution I made for the 2010 AAG meeting. A very simplified version of transforming a world map was part of a Maney online feature. All transformations can help to understand what gridded cartograms actually do to a map and how they relate to an ordinary map that most map readers are much more familiar with.
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