There is a new map in town! Earlier this month during the 125th Anniversary Conference of the Geographical Association in Sheffield (UK) we relaunched the new Worldmapper.org online platform which has been several years in the making. It is not only a fully redesigned website, but also redefines what we want Worldmapper to become over a decade after it has first been released: An atlas for the 21st century that is mapping our place in the world using cartograms.
At the very heart of it Worldmapper is still a collection of world maps where countries are resized according to a broad range of global issues. But with the new website we will increasingly use more diverse cartogram techniques, such as gridded cartograms, as well as start including maps at different scales such as country-level mappings seen on this blog in many ways. Worldmapper will therefore be the most comprehensive repository for cartogram-style mappings that are unique visualisations showing the world as you’ve never seen it before. Check it out at: Worldmapper.org
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Tag Archives: maps
Higher Education Students and Graduates in Europe
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Promoting equity in education and training is consistent with the European welfare state model, with part of the Europe 2020 Strategy aiming to significantly reduce numbers of early leavers from education and increase numbers of graduates with a university degree. The following maps give an insight into the social and spatial disparities in higher education across Europe’s countries and regions. They are all gridded population cartograms where each area is proportional to the number of people living there.
This is a map of students as a percentage of the total population aged 20–24. The reported share can often be higher than 100%, where there are more students who study and live in a city in term time than the numbers of 20- to 24-year-olds that the city officially houses. Also many students are counted who are aged 18, 19 or over 24:
Christmas Card-o-gram 2017: Aurora meets GDP
This year’s christmas card-o-gram blends a view of northern lights (captured near Höfn, East Iceland) with a cartogram of global GDP distribution in 2017:
Unequal Elite: World University Rankings 2016/17
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Education and money undoubtedly go hand in hand. A closer look at the metrics that go into the creation of higher education rankings such as the Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings (THE WUR) proofs just the point that without adequate resources and funding global success can hardly be achieved. The following map which was created by analysing data of the 2016/17 World University Ranking data with regards to its spatial distribution of the most successful universities in this ranking. The map is a gridded cartogram which is reshaped to show national wealth, measured by gross domestic product. The land area in each country has been resized to reflect economic output. North America and Western Europe bugle to dominate this world map, while the entire continent of Africa virtually disappears. On this new world map, all the universities in the THE World University Rankings are plotted, with the larger, red dots representing world’s top 50 universities and the smaller circles representing the lower ranks:
Political Landscapes of the United Kingdom in 2017
How much has the United Kingdom changed following the second general election within two years, and following the referendums on independence in Scotland in 2014 and the membership of the European Union in 2016? Each poll appeared to have had a significant impact on the political debate and the next vote which never seemed far away. As such, the 2017 general election looks like the culmination of the preceding ballots where all of the previous debates got a more or less prominent mention during the electoral campaign. Ultimately this led to some significant changes in the political landscapes of the country with each corner of the United Kingdom being affected by these dynamics.
Politicians, spin doctors and commentators quickly aim to interpret the outcome according to their views. In contrast, the following series of maps showing some key statistics and data from the election results aims to provide a more neutral as well as more comprehensive look at the underlying geographies. It shows different angles on key characteristics such as winners and runners-up in each constituency, changes in votes, vote shares of the two largest parties, turnout and changes in turnout between the last two general elections.
In this feature, different cartographic techniques are used to show how the electoral landscape in the UK is shaped not only by physical space, but also by political dimensions as well as from the perspective of people. The conventional (land area) map is therefore complemented by a hexagon cartogram where each parliamentary constituency is represented by a hexagon (some changes in constituencies over the past decades are reflected in split and merged hexagons), and by a gridded population cartogram where each area is resized according to the number of people living in that area.
Each of the three maps therefore provides a unique insight into the diverse spatial patterns of politics that emerged from the 2017 general election. To fully understand the new political landscapes of the United Kingdom, only a combination of different perspectives as shown here can help to gain a more complete picture. Geography matters not only in its physical dimension, but just as much in its social and political spaces that are depicted in these maps.
Here is the ultimate cartographic wrap-up of the 2017 general election in 21 maps:
Conservative vote share
(click for larger and labelled version)
Labour vote share
(click for larger and labelled version)
Beyond fire and ice: Mapping Iceland in the 21st Century
Iceland and maps have a long tradition in the history of cartography. From the first maps of the country in the 16th century (including works from cartographers such as Ortelius and Mercator, also featuring some nice sea monsters) to today’s advanced digital mappings of Iceland’s diverse natural environment (such as this innovative mapping of water in Iceland or this quite beautiful representation of contour lines), Iceland never really had a lack of quite good cartographic works. Much less covered than the natural environment are the social landscapes of the country, such as this just recently updated version of a gridded population cartogram of the country where each grid cell is proportional to the number of people living in that area:
