Tag Archives: maps

Mapping the field of science fiction and more

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I thoroughly enjoy maps and so was pleased to see this story about an ongoing “multidisciplinary physical and online art project” that includes a collection of maps:

Take “Places & Spaces: Mapping Science,” a multidisciplinary physical and online art project, running since 2005, that seeks to create a complete picture of “human activity and scientific progress on a global scale.” Curated by a group of librarians, information scientists, and geographers around the world, each exhibit features a handful of maps—an older word for infographic—along a theme. Previous years have exhibited maps designed to index information for policy makers, or for cartographers, or economic decision makers.

This year, the theme is the digital library.

One of the entries is a social network of the Bible. Another, “Seeing Standards,” is positively meta: It charts more than 100 widely used rule sets for collating data, and sorts them by strength, community, domain, function, and purpose…

One “Places & Spaces” map bucks the trend, imagining complexity in an entirely different way. The distinction? Ward Shelley’s “The History of Sci­ence Fiction” (full size version here) isn’t pulled from any server’s database. In fact, it’s charmingly analog.

Mr. Shelley is an artist and a teacher at Parsons the New School for Design. He has become known for what he calls “rhetorical drawings”—visual art pieces that draw on such traditionally linguistic markers as narrative and chronology to illustrate ideas.

This science fiction map is quite a work in itself in addition to the amount of information that it displays.  I like how it all comes back in the tentacles on the upper left to “fear” and “wonder.” And the “Stars Wars Effect” section in the bottom right corner is fun as well.

I wonder if someone has ever done something like this for sociology. If done well, it could be great.

Manhattan’s grid created 200 years ago

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Manhattan, the center of New York City, is famous for its street grid running throughout the whole island. Read a short celebration of this grid’s 200th anniversary (which was actually March 21) here. Not only is the grid orderly but it cut the island into developable lots and very quickly, land speculation became a favorite pastime.

What current-day people often forget is that this grid was laid out long before New York City had advanced very far north on the island. This map from the New York City Department of City Planning up to 1998 shows that growth was limited to the southern tip of the island for much of the period that the island has had European inhabitants. (The quality of this online map is atrocious – perhaps they really do want people to send in $3.) And if you want a longer-term view, why not go back to 1609 and compare NYC blocks then and now?

Mapping the most gerrymandered districts

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Buried in some of the election coverage this season was the story that this class of legislators will play an important role in the redistricting process. I love maps and here is a collection of maps of the “top ten most gerrymandered political districts in the United States.”

While there are some short descriptions of how these particular districts came to be defined, I’m sure there are some interesting stories about each case. If more voters knew that this is what districts could look like in the hands of legislators, would there be any outcry?

Fighting “immappancy” by looking at the true size of Africa

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Many people have skewed perceptions of the world due to maps. Americans are used to seeing the United States (and North America) as the focal point of their maps; woe to those who put eastern Asia as the main point or even the Southern Hemisphere as the right way up! (What is interesting in these cases is that it reduces the United States to more of an afterthought. This doesn’t fit American cultural perceptions of our ) Another issue is one of size: because of the typically used projections, Greenland can vary from the largest mass in the world to a small mass. Relative sizes can be difficult to judge.

To combat “immappancy” (which apparently is a mash-up of illiteracy and innumeracy), here is a graphic that shows the size of Africa. Notice how large it is: the contiguous United States, China, all of Europe, and India all fit inside it. Yet how many people would know the true size of Africa?

The home states of military personnel

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Richard Florida uses some data to flesh out Defense Secretary Robert Gates recent comment that there is a growing gap between American civilians and the military. Florida suggests part of the issue is the origin of the military personnel: they tend to come from two particular parts of the country.

Aside from relatively high concentrations in Alaska, Hawaii, Washington state, and North Dakota, the military is overwhelmingly concentrated in two distinctive areas of the Sunbelt: The southeast running from Virgina and North Carolina through Kentucky and down through South Carolina, Georgia and Mississippi; and the corridor fromTexas through Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas and Wyoming. Texas and California now drop out. The upper mid-west and the northeast, especially New England, which tend to be more liberal and left-leaning than the rest of the nation, have very low concentrations of military personnel.

A couple of thoughts:

1. I don’t think this is terribly surprising (though it is helpful to see it in map form).

2. A question: does the military think it might be worthwhile to try to even out these geographic distributions? If so, how could this be done?

3. Are these differences only due to political views (conservatives vs. liberals) or is this really due to social class?

4. I’m glad Florida added data that accounts for differences in population size – the initial map simply showed more military personnel come from more populous states.

h/t Instapundit

Maps of race in American cities

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The Daily Mail has some maps based on the new 2010 Census data that shows where people of different races live in some of the largest American cities. The article emphasizes the easy-to-see racial divides.