{"id":4986,"date":"2016-10-21T22:20:46","date_gmt":"2016-10-21T22:20:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.viewsoftheworld.net\/?p=4986"},"modified":"2018-03-29T08:55:39","modified_gmt":"2018-03-29T08:55:39","slug":"beyond-fire-ice-mapping-iceland-21st-century","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.viewsoftheworld.net\/?p=4986","title":{"rendered":"Beyond fire and ice: Mapping Iceland in the 21st Century"},"content":{"rendered":"

Iceland and maps have a long tradition in the history of cartography<\/a>. From the first maps of the country in the 16th century<\/a> (including works from cartographers such as Ortelius<\/a> and Mercator<\/a>, also featuring some nice sea monsters<\/a>) to today’s advanced digital mappings of Iceland’s diverse natural environment (such as this innovative mapping of water in Iceland<\/a> or this quite beautiful representation of contour lines<\/a>), 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:<\/p>\n

\"Gridded<\/a>
\n(click for larger version)<\/a><\/p>\n

When I created the original version of this map in 2009 for the Worldmapper Population Atlas<\/a>, it was the first cartogram of Iceland that was every produced, although the original version was a less detailed one, based on a less accurate population grid (and also being more ignorant with very few labels on the towns and cities, which is a bit more detailed in the above map).
\nOther human cartographic representations are very rare, so that I used this theme to look into the future of mapping (in) Iceland in the 21st century for a talk at the 30th Anniversary Symposium of the Association of Icelandic Geographers (Afm\u00e6lisr\u00e1\u00f0stefna F\u00e9lags landfr\u00e6\u00f0inga 2016)<\/a> which took place last month in the National Museum of Iceland (\u00dej\u00f3\u00f0minjasafns \u00cdslands)<\/a> in Reykjav\u00edk. These were the slides that I showed during the talk – with a lot of maps from the past, present – and a little bit of where the future could be heading towards:<\/p>\n