Turning the world upside down
Categories : Africa, Australia, Travel |
I don’t know a whole lot about cartography but I like looking at maps and atlases. Because mapping a round world onto a flat map necessarily involves some distortion of actual size it can be difficult to visually compare the sizes of different countries/continents. For example on many maps Africa often appears to be not as
large as it actually is. This map helps give a better idea of just how vast Africa really is. I discovered this map at a brilliant blog called Strange Maps. They have a panopoly of unusual and quirky maps. They are so brilliant it is tempting to post a few of them up here but I’ll refrain and let you explore the site yourself.
Also interesting to read is the blog post that accompanies the Africa map, and some of the heated discussion that ensues. Who would have thought that the topic of Alaska could be such a sensitive one? It’s interesting how even the subject of cartography can be prone to accusations of politico-cultural bias. I don’t know if this was an intentional thing, but it is true that many of the maps we have are distorted in such a way that the wealthier northern countries appear larger than poorer and southern nations. An interesting map to view is the Peter’s Projection, which attempts to give a more actual visual representation of the relative size of parts of the world than the familiar Mercator projection.
Once again I don’t know if this reflects an intentional cultural bias, but I was quite taken aback the other day whilst watching an episode of The Gilmore Girls with Jenni. On the wall in a scholl classroom was a world map, but instead of the usual map which is approximately centered on Europe and the Prime Meridian this map was actually centered on the Americas, thus necessitating a bit cut through the Eurasian continent on each edge of the map. I know we often jokingly say Americans see themselves as being at the center of the world, but I thought that was taking it to extremes. It’s almost the same as if us Australians (and South Africans and Argentinians) were to adopt a map like the one below (which is actually an inverted Peters)… 
