Tag Archives: cartogram

Open Access Week 2011

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The Open Access Week goes into its fifth year in 2011, promoting Open Access as a new norm in scholarship and research. It takes place from October 24 to 30 in many places around the globe.

“This year, programs highlighting publishing and rights management choices for faculty authors, use of new media, and opportunities created by re-mixing and re-using scholarly materials are on tap. Open Educational Resources are another key topic, as is open-source technology” (see more details in the 2011 announcement).

In collaboration with SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), who are the organisers of the event, I have created an updated map of this year’s activities around the world. It connects to the map that we created last year for the 2010 event. The map shows a picture of the world according to the number of planned activities to be organised by country along forthcoming Open Access Week. Comparing this picture to last year, it can be seen that the participation in the event is slowly changing and very similar to last year. Comparing this picture to the proportion of scientific papers produced in the world (as shown on worldmapper), this picture can be seen as a welcoming trend for a higher awareness for free accessibility of the knowledge that is produced in the wealthier world. The importance of Open Access in the poorer parts of the world, as reflected in next week’s OA2011 activities in India and parts of Africa, are as important as the awareness for Open Access in general, as this can help to make research from those countries visible and accessible in a wider context (read more about this topic in Pablo de Castro’s contribution in the BioMed Blog).

Map of activities during the Open Access Week 2011(click for larger map)

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The Human Shape of Germany

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Maps of Germany’s population have become a regular feature on this website, starting with the first version of a topographical display of the gridded population cartogram of the country in 2009 to the more detailed analysis of population densities and demographic trends at the 20th anniversary of the reunification last year. One year on, as one of the economic strongholds Germany is in the spotlight of the financial turmoil in the Eurozone. When following the populist media, Germany’s population itself appears to be more unified than ever, at least in the question of the euro bailout.
Putting politics aside, it’s time to look at the German population once again.

High Resolution Map / Gridded Population Cartogram of Germany
(click for larger map)

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The Pearl River Delta: A City of Cities

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Earlier this year the British Telegraph Newspaper published a story about the creation of a new megacity in the Chinese Pearl River delta region. “China is planning to create the world’s biggest mega city by merging nine cities to create a metropolis twice the size of Wales with a population of 42 million”, the opener of their story stated. The region mentioned here is an area covering the cities of Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Donggaun, Foshan, Huizhou, Zhaoqing, Jiangmen, Zhongshan and Zhuhai (as described in the China Urban Development Blog). The story was quickly picked up by many news sources back then, while Chinese officials were quick to deny the reports. Stories like this show, how urbanisation and megacities have become a buzz word, and are used especially in relation to the emerging economies in Asia in order to picture these – for western-centric eyes unbelievably – large and still growing populations in the most urbanised regions on the planet. A few thoughts on the relevance of megacities in their global context have been published on this website before (related to the map of the world’s megacities).
With special regard to the Telegraph story I have drawn another map showing the population distribution of China (based on 2010 Data from the Chinese Census and from estimates of SEDAC’s GPW database) and highlighted the Pearl River Delta region in this map. The equal-population map shows a gridded population cartogram in which every grid cell is resized according to the total number of people living there. This map makes the plans of a more integrated Pearl River Delta region more understandable, and perhaps slightly less exciting for those who interpreted the news as the creation of a new megacity, rather than the logical step in connecting an already populous region.

Map / Gridded Population Cartogram of China and the Pearl River Delta
(click for larger map)

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In Focus: Global Population Shifts

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Political InsightAccording to recent estimates by the UN, the world’s population will reach 7 billion some time this year, and rise to over 10 billion by 2100. In an article for the “In Focus” section of Political Insight (September 2011, Volume 2, Issue 2) Danny Dorling and I show where the population is growing and where it is declining.
The map we created for this feature shows not only the growth and decline in relation to the global population distribution, but also highlights the places that are in growth an decline in two separate maps. This is a preview of the maps that we created for the article:
Global Population Shifts 1990-2015 Preview map Continue reading →

When does it always rain on us?

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Where rain (or more precisely: precipitation) is affecting most people, and where it falls mainly on uninhabited land has been part of the presentation that I gave at this year’s SoC meeting in Plymouth (where the delegates witnessed some of the rain from the maps shown below, but enjoyed a little bit of the late summer’s sunshine as well). An animation of these maps and the annual precipitation map have been published on this website last week (see here).
The following series of maps shows monthly precipitation patterns derived from monitored climate data of approximately 50 years (1950-2000, data obtained from http://worldclim.org/). The underlying popoulation grid is a gridded cartogram transformation of the global population distribution population data from SEDAC). As explained in more detail in the previous entry, this representation is a view of how the world’s population is directly exposed to the monthly precipitation patterns, shrinking all those unpopulated parts of the land surface while proportionally increasing the size of land according to the total number of people living there. The choropleth overlay visualises precipitation just as in a conventional map (also shown in the inset map. This shows, when it rains on humanity throughout the year – month by month: Continue reading →

Where does it always rain on us?

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Map Animation / Gridded Population Cartogram of Rainfall (Precipitation) patterns in relation to people

Does it never rain in Southern California? And can we find the rain in Spain mainly in the plain? And what does that all mean for the people living in these places? Where does rain matter most for the population? In some places, it can be a much needed scarcity, elsewhere it appears in a much dreaded surplus. Wherever it is falling, rain matters a lot where people are. Partly, the global population distribution can be explained by climate patterns, with rain being a crucial factor for the agriculture in a region. In my presentation for the delegate’s session at this year’s 47th annual meeting of the British Society of Cartographers in Plymouth I took a closer look at the weather, or to be more precise, at climate patterns and their visualisation using gridded cartograms. Part of the presentation was an animation showing the global precipitation patterns projected on a gridded population cartogram. The following map shows the annual precipitation in relation to the global population distribution. The small map inset gives the conventional view of the same data, demonstrating how the perspective changes when seeing the same topic from two different views: Continue reading →