My grandmother told me that geography was taught as follows: First learn all the towns, rivers, etc. by name in your own country. You had to deliver the name of a town when a ‘blind’ map was used. [that is: A map with red spots on it, but no letters]
After learning your own country by heart, the rest of Europe came next.
After that, the rest of the world.
Could an enlarged Europe on a map have helped learning all places in Europe by heart?
She said she could still remember England towns, from top to bottom. Aberdeen, Dundee, Glasgow, Leeds, Hull, Liverpool etc. [Hey, this is probably the wrong order. My grandma would have known the correct one. ]
The problem is, there is always an inherent bias in any map projection. The key is using a projection that allows one to convey meaningful information with the minimum of distortion. A Mercator projection map is wonderful for navigation (because direction is preserved at the expense of other cartographic concerns). However, it’s a horrible projection if you want to accurately portray the shape and size of landmasses. And most cartographers/geographers use other projections when conveying thematic information - using a Robinson projection, for example, in communicating climate regions or biomes (check out any Rand McNally Atlas to see examples). National Geographic uses the Winkel Tripel projection in conveying thematic data (somewhat similar to Robinson projection).
The Dymaxion projection is biased in that it attempts to minimize the distortaion in the shape and size of landmasses (at the expense of distance and direction, not to mention chopping up the oceans). In other words, if you want a map to depict the actual shape and size of the landmasses, the Dymaxion projection does a good job. Is it one that can (or should) be used to convey thematic information? Good question - and that is something one needs to consider. It depends on what you want to communicate.
Note: I should point out that the text I am currently using in my World Regional Geography class - World Regions in Global Context by Marston, Knox, and Liverman - the Dymaxion projection is used to convey thematic information quite nicely.
Thanks for pointing that out, Northern Piper. I’d skimmed over that point, and it had sort of registered with me.
However, when I had clicked on the “External Links” on that page, namely the Fuller map homepage, the PDF explanation of the map, and the Dymaxion Projection Animation, every unfolded Bucky map without exception showed the North Pole in the approximate center, and Australia and Antarctica off in the wings. The animations of the unfolding show the exact same configuration each time. If you look at the Fuller Institute’s Catalog (PDF file), the flat maps all show the North-Pole-centric view.
I don’t have anything against Buckminster Fuller (quite the opposite!), and I think his projection is very clever. It clearly has important applications. However, I view it as a little misleading for the BFI to claim that it doesn’t “perpetuate the cultural bias that is part of all other world maps”, when every single manifestation shown on their web site is North-centric. The original Fuller concept may have been to allow total reconfiguration, which is a noble idea, but the BFI seems to have lost sight of that. Dymaxion may be potentially reconfigurable, but so is Mercator (at least as regards the choice of North or South at the top of the map, and which meridian is in the center).
[eponymous, I appreciate your detailed post. My beef with the BFI Dymaxion map was not that it posessed some bias (indeed I appreciate that bias of some sort is inevitable!) but that it claimed to be free of North-South bias, and then proceeded to give only instances that contained a severe example of that. I’ll accept that it’s a very useful projection; I’m just calling foul on BFI’s implementation of it].
Sorry, I seem to have made this a much bigger deal than I had originally intended!
Right order, wrong country (well, for three of them at least)
In answer to the OP, I have never come across any map that has deliberately enlarged Europe at the expense of other continents (apart from the cartograms which represent, say, wealth by different sized boxes for each country, as eponymous described. Oh, and the spoof BBC globe with England filling most of the Atlantic, as used on Harry Enfield’s “Mr Cholmondley-Warner” sketches.
I am 90% certain that this is a misremembered bit of information about the Mercator projection. Back in the 1980s there was something of a witch-hunt against the Mercator map as certain factions tried to push for the Peters projection, which just makes Africa stupidly skinny. (Re-enforcing more negative stereotypes, anyone?). I still have a UNICEF wall map from the 1980s in the Peters projection, on the back of which is a lengthy screed condemning the Eurocentric Mercator projection. And never mind that Mercator makes navigation nice and easy, as rhumb lines are straight lines on the map :rolleyes:
I’m English and as old as Methusala, so my (very old fashioned) school had maps and atlases that had countries like Rhodesia, Ceylon, Bechuanaland and so on. These maps also coloured the British Empire pink.
I was told at school that the reason that the Mercator projection was some commonly used is that it made the globe much pinker than any other projection.
I have no cite etc for this - it’s just what they told me at school.
In answer to the OP, yes, maps which use projections that fail to preserve the relative areas of landmasses and therefore inflate the aparent size of Europe (and other high-latitude places) are still in wide use. However, such use should not be regarded as having any agenda vis-a-vis North-South geopolitics. Such non-equal-area projections are useful for many purposes in which their more accurate properties (maintainence of proper shapes or directions) are desireable.
As for the almost absurd prevalence of the Mercator projection, I’ve always thought that when a publication called for a world map of some sort, the graphic artist or layout tech just grabbed the one that is conveiniently rectangular.
I favor the interrupted Goode Homolosine projection myself.
Except for specialized cases as mentioned earlier, not in modern map-making using mathematical projections. Before then, though, say in the charts of the early explorers in the 15th thru 17th centuries, it would not be uncommon to have that part of the world in which you’d do most of your business be portrayed unnaturally bigger, only because you knew more details about it and had to fit them, or you wantedto flatter your patron by making their country look bigger, and in any case what you wanted was just to know the general direction of travel. So at that time, underestimation of the size of the rest of the world would not be rare (Heck, Columbus underestimated the circumference of the Earth by something like 6,000 miles in order to sell his proposal to the Crown!)
Before modern surveying techniques were used, France was thought to be approx. 10% bigger than it really was, IIRC.
When the first official surveys were done, maps had to be re-drawn and the country’s area had to be revised downwards.
I’ve read this in 2 or 3 books, most recently in Measuring America by Andro Linklater.
]