There was an episode of ‘The West Wing’ where a group of cartographers wanted a policy change regarding maps. The point of their argument was that current maps are so inaccurate in regards to the size and position of the continents(Africa and South America being much larger than maps would have us believe). They said this was deliberate, that the US and Europe were exaggerated in size because of their ‘importance’.
My question is this. Is any of that true? Do maps accurately reflect the relative size of nations and continents?
I was always told that the reason the present projection (mercator) is so common is that it flattered the British empire (which was always coloured pink here in Britain) by exaggerating the areas we held eg Canada, Australia, Southern Africa and so on.
The problem is that the earth is (roughly) spherical, whereas your map has to be flat. (Makes for easier storage if nothing else.)
There are several ways to map a sphere to a plane, but there will always be distortions.
Have a look at Carto Corner for their take on the subject.
They have quite instructive illustrations as well!
owlstretchingtime, nice theory, but the standard projections are very unflattering for India, Palestine and whatever the empire had in the near east. (And, would it really make Australia and South Africa look that much bigger? They’re nowhere near as far from the equator as Canada or Greenland.)
When my son was in junior high, back in the 80s, he had a map assignment in geography class. I don’t remember the questions, but they included, “If you are flying direct from London to New Delhi, which country do you spend the largest amount of time over?” If you draw a straight line on your flat map, you see the flight going over middle of Europe, Turkey, Iran, etc. If you draw the shortest line (geodesic) on a globe, you spend an enormous amount of time over what was then the USSR, it’s a different route entirely.
Another question was taking a straight line from NY to Cairo. On a flat map, you miss Spain. On a globe, you go right across Spain.
So, the flat map projections introduces distortions. The worst distortion (as pointed out in West Wing) is probably the size of Greenland – Greenland aint that big.
It should be noted that the Mercator projection was extremely useful for sailing, because longitude and latitude lines (curved lines on the globe) became “straight” lines on the flat map, useful for navigation. It wasn’t a deliberate plot to express Western European superiority or any such nonsense – it was a convenient projection, made by Europeans who were doing the bulk of the navigation.
The projections commonly seen in North America (and Europe, I presume) have their separations typically along the International Date Line. Not only is that convenient, but it puts the Center of Civilization right in the middle.
Someone in Asia can confirm/deny this, but I understand that Japanese maps are separated down the Atlantic instead, putting Japan right in the middle. If true, that’s gotta be the same idea psychologically.
I once saw a joke Australian map with South at the top and Oz in the middle. That’s equally valid, cartographically.
yojimbo has provided the links to the Peters projection. Arno Peters promoted it in the seventies as an equal area map, and charged that map makers were deliberately or nondeliberately culturally biased.
The Mercator projection is the one that is criticized the most, because of its distortion at high latitudes, and because it used to appear on so many walls. But I was told of its inadequacies in grade school forty years ago, and globes are a common item in a lot of classrooms. Look at a globe for yourself if you want a better idea of continental relationships.
Unfortunately, there are a lot better map projections out there than the Peters. Even better equal area maps, some that were around before Peters developed his–but I’ve seen charges that the only reason that his is not adopted is because of cultural bias–rather than cartographic sense. The writers of West Wing may have been writing about this controversy.
Why am I always so late coming to the questions I know the most about?
I am a cartographer (IAAC), but CK Dexter Haven already answered perfectly! Darn you for beating me to the punch on the topic I studied for 4 years!
My favorite, discontinuites be damned, of the more traditional projections, is the Goode’s Homolosine http://baby.indstate.edu/gga/gga_cart/gecar180.htm
It’s equal-area, so no one gets slighted, and it’s way cool-looking. Its not confromal or equidistant, though, so don’t navigate with or trace from it…
i don’t know about sizes but i noticed something as a child ages ago , if you buy a map of the earth (world is arrogant i reckon) in America then America is in the middle , Europe and the middle is europe , esp China , the chinese charactors of China mean middle country , so thats one kind of difference
Slight addition - it isn’t so much that the Mercator projection represents longitude and latitude lines as straight lines, but that it represents compass directions as straight lines. That’s how you construct it - represent longitude / latitude as straight lines, and stretch the latitude distances away from the equator so as to make compass directions straight lines (true compass directions, not magnetic - let’s not go there). You could have any number of projections with straight long / lat lines that did not have this property. The advantage is that you draw a line between two points on the map, and use a protractor to measure a compass heading to sail between them (which will not, generally, be the shortest path, but that’s also a different discussion).
As someone pointed out, different projections have different desireable properties - there is no “perfect” way to represent a spherical surface on a flat piece of paper.
The Peters map is actually very distorting. The proponents for it have actually claimed that that was a plus–when people see it for the first time, they are so confused that it “jumpstarts” the thinking process. Compare the Peters map to any globe.
That’s another reason for wondering if that was actually the map that they used on West Wing–maybe they didn’t say the name of it.
Yep, they are. Here’s an example. The text will be a mess if you don’t have a Japanese character set, but the picture should show up just fine. The link below the pic is for a larger version in .pdf format.
If I recall correctly, the name “Middle Kingdom” was supposed to represent that China was the plane of existence in between paradise and hell.
Joke? Whaddayamean “joke”? This is just an accurate, appropriately drawn map. Sheesh.
Any Aussie you talk to will have a favourite tale about their acquaintance from the US or Europe who came to stay and announced that they thought they might drive to Perth or Darwin the next day (or whatever). “See you next month then, OK?”
