Views of the World

Mapping rain as a shared pain

worldmapper — Wed, 09 May 2012 05:00:39 +0000

This April has been the wettest April on record in the UK, while parts of the country are also in official drought – leading to headlines of the wettest drought on record.
The miserable weather was (is) a good opportunity to finally produce a high-resolution version of the map series that I created during my PhD research and which I presented at last year’s conference of the Society of Cartographers in Plymouth. The maps are not new, and each individual maps can be viewed and downloaded here, but if you are viewing this on a higher resolution display, you may enjoy the map series in all its detail:

As described in the above linked pages, the animation shows precipitation data in relation to the world’s population distribution based on a gridded population cartogram (population data used here comes from SEDAC’s GPWv3 database). The precipitation data used in the map series is based on long term records and interpolations published on Worldclim.org and as described by Hijmans, R.J., S.E. Cameron, J.L. Parra, P.G. Jones and A. Jarvis, 2005 (Very high resolution interpolated climate surfaces for global land areas. International Journal of Climatology 25: 1965-1978). The maps therefore gives more space to highlight how and where rainfall patterns directly affect the human populations on the planet, adding another analytical dimension to the data display.
While a gridded cartogram display adds further analytical value for a visual examination of the data from a different perspective, the raw data itself can also be used in less serious ways to analyse the interrelation of population and rain which was one of the outtakes of my first looks at the original data. Using the absolute rainfall and the total population, one can calculate the rainfall per person in an area, which is a fairly useless calculation that reduces the appearance of rain in the most populous areas and tells very little about how people perceive the long term weather conditions, as the following map extract shows for Europe:

(click for larger view)

The outcome of combining population and rainfall data is a map display that results in a nice visualisation that should be taken as nothing else than a conceptual map of geospatial data that demonstrates, how two different dimensions of data interrelate. It can be useful for an exploration of the data from different perspectives, but is certainly less useful as a geographic representation of how population and climate conditions are related (geodeterminism, anyone?). The main reason for showing this map here is the comparison of the effective display of the interrelations between the two data dimensions using a gridded population cartogram projection, which does a very similar combination of the data as the ‘rainfall density’ map, but results in a much more useful visualisation of the topic. While the gridded population cartogram allows to distinguish between the human and the physical space (which is represented in the grid cells), the quantitative information of the rainfall patterns is preserved and can be understood from a people’s perspective (and may be useful to explain how some of these patterns can indeed be explained in a determinist way: many of the driest regions on the planet match the least populated places, though the global settlement patterns follow a more complex set of variables that all contribute to where we live in what densities). Combining the two dimensions in a conventional map projection is hard to achieve, as this is limited to the extent of the physical space. A simple choropleth display of the two data values is not appropriate when calculating the two against each other as in the above map (and thus not allowing to know whether a high data value results from low population values of from high amounts of precipitation). If at all, then this is useful for an exploratory analysis of how the two values interact.
Apparently there are other solutions to display multi-dimensional data in conventional maps, but these often are more complex and harder to read. This may also be the case for a gridded population cartogram when it is seen for the first time, but once the basic concept of the map is understood, it can be used to read and understand any other geospatial data from the human perspective.
These are two ways of showing the same data – mapping rainfall as a shared pain (or blessing, as it is for most of the world’s population). What the two versions of mapping the data show is that the way how one analyses data and how one puts it on a map matters a lot. There is not a single good or bad way to put geospatial data on a map, but they way it is processed and visualised. Bad maps don’t have to be wrong, but may simply miss out on an adequate presentation of their underlying data.

One good start for an advanced insight into how geospatial data can be analysed sensibly can be found in the book Geospatial Analysis by Mike de Smith, Mike Goodchild and Paul Longley, which is also available as a freely accessible online edition: http://www.spatialanalysisonline.com/output/. Only a appropriate – and sensible – analysis of data is then suitable for the subsequent geovisualisation in form of a map (as covered in many good books, such as the upcoming Cartographer’s Toolkit that gives a little bit space for a gridded cartogram as well). Far too often the two worlds of analysis and visualisation remain disparate worlds, with both sides remaining quite ignorant of what the other side of the same coin has to offer…

The maps on this page have been created by Benjamin D. Hennig of the SASI Research Group (University of Sheffield). Feel free to use the material on this page under Creative Commons conditions (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0); please contact me for further details – I also appreciate a notification if you use my maps. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

Political Landscapes of London

worldmapper — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 06:00:01 +0000

Londoners will decide on their new mayor on the 3rd of May in this year’s mayoral election. Directly elected mayors were introduced in England in 2000 when Labour candidate Ken Livingstone was elected the first Mayor of London. He therefore also became the first to have this position in England under the Local Government Act 2000 introduced by the then Labour government under Prime Minister Tony Blair. Meanwhile, other cities have followed, and more will have a referendum on the issue on the same day Londoners go to the polls this year.
Livingstone was serving as Mayor for two consecutive terms, but got beaten at the last election in 2008 by the current Mayor Boris Johnson. Both candidates now fight for re-election and their chance to lead the city into an eventful year (and beyond). What is often less talked about are the remaining candidates of the smaller parties, which also stand for election. Seven candidates stand for election this year, representing various political shades. And while eventually it will be a battle between the two candidates of the Conservative and the Labour Party, the voting patterns beyond the provide interesting details of London’s political landscapes, as outlined in a feature that Danny Dorling and I prepared for Political Insight (see previous post on this website).
Voters can make a first and second choice from the list of candidates. If their 1st preference vote is not successful in the first round of counting votes (where a candidate has to come over 50% of the votes to be successful), then their second preference will be taken into account and added to the candidates that made it through the first round of counting. This voting system allows voters to express their main political preference first, while not losing their vote to a less likely candidate (as they can still support a stronger candidate that they prefer to another one). Therefore the 1st preference vote provides a clearer view of what political perspectives are represented in London.
In my analysis of the 2008 election (data was kindly provided by Michael Thrasher of the University of Plymouth), I took a look beyond the two main parties and mapped the proportional distribution of votes for all political parties that had a candidate standing for election at the 2008 mayoral election. The geographical patterns that emerge are expression of the diverse demographics that compose the social landscape of the capital: In the following map, each party’s individual shares are mapped onto a gridded population cartogram of London:

(click for larger view)

The two main political parties, Labour and Conservative, are one aspect (and too often the only that people look at), together assembling an almost complementary image of what is the majority of votes that were cast in 2008. Beyond that, the general trend of the distribution of votes from the smaller parties shows perhaps less surprisingly that the more right-wing views are mainly concentrated in areas that are otherwise Conservative heartland. However, between these parties there is clear difference between the strongholds of the respective parties, such as the BNP being particularly string in the east of the city, while UKIP builds a much stronger and almost contiguous ring of supporters in Outer London. The more left-oriented voters, in conrast, are to be found in the more central areas, and between North Central and North East London – not least where many students live, complemented by Green Party supporters towards the West and South of these areas. The Liberal Democrats complete that assessment by adding strongholds in the South West and the fringes of Green and Left List-voting.
It is important to keep in mind that each of these patterns stands for considerably different total votes, as the following graph shows. The bar chart shows the outcome of the first preference votes from that election (displayed in logarithmic scales to give the smaller parties enough space to allow for a better distinction):

Despite the differences in total votes however, the very specific patterns that emerged from the 2008 election are a good indicator for the patchwork of socioeconomic conditions and their demographic position that people are living in. The BNP, for example, has a maximum vote share of over 20% (even slightly more that the maximum vote share of the Liberal Democrats, even if they are much stronger in their total vote share). While the mainstream parties get the majority of votes across the city (and will decide the outcome of the election), the distribution of votes for minor parties shows the prevailing more polarised views that people hold in the different areas of the city. This will eventually also reflect the decision that people make who vote for one of the two big parties (and who will most probably get the second vote that is usually needed to be successful in that election). But it is more than just politics that these maps show. It is an assessment of how people live and what people think they need to change their lives (or to sustain their position) in a city that is often seen as the most unequal city in the western world.
A modified version of this map was published in a Political Insight feature:

Hennig, B. D. and Dorling, D. (2012). In Focus: London’s political landscapes. Political Insight 3 (1): 38.
Article online (Wiley)

The map on this page has been created by Benjamin D. Hennig of the SASI Research Group (University of Sheffield) as part of a research project funded by the Trust for London. Feel free to use the maps on this page under Creative Commons conditions (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0); please contact me for further details – I also appreciate a notification if you use my maps. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

In Focus: London’s political landscapes

worldmapper — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 09:00:38 +0000

Ahead of this year’s vote we had a look at the geography of the 2008 London mayoral election. In an article for the “In Focus” section of Political Insight (April 2012, Volume 3, Issue 1) Danny Dorling and I analysed the patterns of first-preference votes at the last election in the UK’s capital city.
The map series that I created for this feature displays the distribution of first preference votes shares for each respective party that put up a candidate. This allows not only to see the eventual outcome (which resulted in the then mayor Ken Livingstone of Labour being put into second place but the current mayor Boris Johnson of the Conservatives), but also gave an impression of the distribution of preferences for the smaller political parties within the city, as most voters put their main party preference into their first vote, while giving their second preference to a stronger candidate of the larger parties. The maps are based on a gridded population cartogram of London (as featured in the London in Maps book). This is a preview of the maps that we created for the article (a larger version of this map can be found here):

Here are the bibliographic details:

Hennig, B. D. and Dorling, D. (2012). In Focus: London’s political landscapes. Political Insight 3 (1): 38.
Article online (Wiley)

See more maps about politics here.

Germany: 20 years of exports from Europe’s economic powerhouse

worldmapper — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 05:00:34 +0000

Europe’s Economic Powerhouse Drifts East read a headline in the New York Times last year, referring to the shifting economies not only within the European Union as shown in a series of cartograms on this website, but also in a wider sense. As the NYT states: “Last year [i.e. 2010], the euro area’s share of German exports fell to 41 percent from 43 percent in 2008, while Asia’s share rose to 16 percent from 12 percent, according to Bundesbank figures. During the same period, exports to Asia rose by €28 billion, while exports to the euro area fell by the same amount.“ This trend is interesting when reflecting on the implications of Germany’s continuing strength amid a continent of economic woes: With its economic strength, the country is doomed to take over some leadership in Europe, while its past makes it struggle to do so. The Guardian recently stated that “Germany, Europe’s reluctant Goliath, is hiding its true strength“.
The European Economic Area has always been the centre of German exports. However, against some perceptions that the creation of the Eurozone led to a manifestation Germany’s dependence on the European trade, the opposite seems to be the case when looking at the changes in German exports that are also described in the above mentioned NYT article. A comparison of the exports in 1991, when the freshly unified country still traded in its own beloved – and quite strong – currency (the Deutsche Mark), and 20 years on in 2011 shows the changing trends that also reflect the shifting economic powers on a global stage. In 1991 the ties to Germany’s European neighbours were particularly strong, while in Asia only Japan played an important role. Twenty years later, and 10 years after the introduction of the Euro currency, German exports (as shown in the recently released trade figures from the Federal Statistical Office) are still concentrated in Europe, with 59% of exports going to member states of the European Union. At the same time, that share is in decline. Inner-European trade has shifted eastwards to the new member states of the European Union (shown in blue in the following map), reflecting the growth of the Easter European economies. The share of France as Germany’s main trading partner fell from 13.2 to 9.6 percent (but still is the main consumer of German exports). At the same time, exports to Asia has gained some significant boost: China received exports 30 times as high as in 1991, and bought German exports worth 65 billion Euro, making it the fifth largest receiver of German exports. The USA are now the second largest importer of German goods, while seven out of the ten largest importers of German exports are countries of the EU.
For geographical but also political reasons, the success of German exports has always been rooted in Europe – long before the Euro has arrived as a currency, but a more detailed look into the trade structure also shows that these patterns are changing. As the economic centre of the global economy changes eastwards – within Europe as well as beyond the continent – so does the trade of the German economy shift eastwards and beyond Europe which made it an ongoing success story of its manufacturing sector to date. It is hard to use these figures to make a case about Germany merely benefitting from the Eurozone crisis when taking a historic view of the German economy into account. Some of the recent interpretations in the media can be proven wrong with a wider perspective on these long-term developments in the past. But it also shows how important the European trade still is for the country’s economy, and thus how important a sustainable solution for Europe’s economic future is needed to retain that prosperity.
The following two maps show the described trends from 1991 and 2011 in form of Worldmapper-style density equalising-cartograms in which the countries of the world are resized according to their shares of German exports in the two respective years:

(click for larger version)

The maps have been created for the German Wirtschaftszeitung AKTIV magazine. The article is available online at http://www.aktiv-online.info and as a pdf download.
The map on this page has been created by Benjamin D. Hennig of the SASI Research Group (University of Sheffield) in collaboration with Wirtschaftszeitung AKTIV.

The Emerald Island

worldmapper — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 05:00:59 +0000

This image of the day in NASA’s Earth Observatory is an extremely rare display of a cloud-free Irish island. NASA says:

It is easy to see from this true-color image why Ireland is called the Emerald Isle. Intense green vegetation, primarily grassland, covers most of the country except for the exposed rock on mountaintops. Ireland owes its greenness to moderate temperatures and moist air. The Atlantic Ocean, particularly the warm currents in the North Atlantic Drift, gives the country a more temperate climate than most others at the same latitude.

That image coincided with St Patrick’s day last year, for which I created an Irish-Island version of the population cartogram series (see the Ireland Population Cartogram here). With such a beautiful satellite view of the island, I took the chance to re-draw that cartogram using the satellite imagery as a basemap instead of the unicoloured original. The new population cartogram shows the MODIS satellite image distorted to match the island’s population, with each person living there given the same amount of space on the new map. The resulting map image shows a slightly less emerald-green image, because the more greyish-brown urban areas grow in size, while the green landscape is far less populated and thus reduced in size. The map includes two insets, one showing the original satellite image as a reference, and the top-right map showing the same cartogram with some major urban areas labeled:

(click for larger map)
Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

The map on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig. Feel free to use the map under Creative Commons conditions (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0); please contact me for further details – I also appreciate a notification if you use my maps. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

Mapping the Anthropocene

worldmapper — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 12:00:07 +0000

The 5th of March 2012 marks the 500th birthday of Gerardus Mercator, the creator of the world map that profoundly changed our views of the world. He was not the only one who worked on a conformal map projection in the 16th century, which was still an age of exploration and discovery. But he was the first to do the maths right and complete a world map that allowed ships to navigate around the planet by its ability to represent lines of constant course. That makes the Mercator projection a milestone in the history of cartography and remains one of the central map projections up to the present day.
The Mercator projection, however, is not always the most appropriate projection. It is useful in nautical issues, but far less suitable for map purposes in which distances or areas are in the centre of interest. When misunderstood, using a Mercator projection can even lead to some awkward misinterpretations: An infamous example is a map drawn by The Economist showing North Korean missile ranges drawn in circles on a Mercator map.
A vast amount of projections has been developed since Mercator released his iconic map in 1569, mostly trying to find the optimal solution to “preserve some properties of the sphere-like body” (see a comprehensive overview of map projections at Wikipedia). Far less consideration so far has been given to the question of different spaces. The spatial turn has been widely discussed, not only in the circles of human geography. Far less thoughts have been spent on an adequate visual representations of new understandings of space as a result of processes of globalisation and global change.
Geologists and environmental scientists have shaped the term Anthropocene for the impact that humanity has on the physical environment. Crutzen speaks of the geology of mankind, which highlights the relevance that our species has in the transformation of nature. The concept has also found a wider attention in the media recently (see e.g. these articles from the BBC and the NYT), showing that the issues related to the idea are becoming ever more pressing for the future of humanity. As stated in the New York Times, “Humans were inevitably going to be part of the fossil record. But the true meaning of the Anthropocene is that we have affected nearly every aspect of our environment — from a warming atmosphere to the bottom of an acidifying ocean.”
Cartography appears to be predestined to show these issues in visual form on maps. The educational Globaia project is one interesting example that produced some stunning imagery of human activity. Like other maps, it uses conventional map depictions in its approach, which may help in understanding the underlying issues, but is not particularly novel. The claim that I made as a result of my doctoral research is that we also need new cartographic concepts to fully understand the full extent of human-environment relationship and to fully comprehend the age of humankind. Mercator had a great impact to lead us into a globalised world, but we are no longer in an age of exploring unknown places, rather than an age of discovering alternative pathways into our own future.
In my plenary speech to the Population Specialty Group at this year’s AAG conference in New York City I showed a map that was made in collaboration with Globaia, showing some key indicators of human activity on the planet projected on a gridded population cartogram projection. The following map shows one example for such an attempt to redraw the impact of humanity on those spaces where people live. The map gives equal space to every person living on the planet, while preserving the geographical reference of the additional layers that are shown on the map. The issues depicted in the map include night lights, major roads, railways, power lines, pipelines, overseas cables, air lines and shipping lanes (see a full account of the data on the Globaia website). Many of the issues have been shown as individual maps on this website or in my PhD thesis, but this map brings some of the key aspects of human (inter)activity on earth together and shows them on an equal population projection:
(click for larger view)

My talk concluded in a slightly bold manner: Is it too much of an aspiration to take the chance of celebrating Mercator’s 500th birthday by changing our mental map of the world from one that guides ships to one that guides our journey into a more sustainable future for humanity?
Mercator’s map was a great achievement, but we should not forget to move on and find new ways of thinking about our world. A map cannot change the world, but maps can change the way we view the world. It is about time to change our views to see how we can live our lives a bit less stupid to make our impact a bit more sustainable, and create a more equal world for every person living on this planet. Gridded cartograms are not the only way to draw new maps, but stand for one possibility to rethink our view of the world. A gridded population cartogram can therefore be one new basemap for a cartography of the Anthropocene.

The map on this page has been created by Benjamin D. Hennig of the SASI Research Group (University of Sheffield) in collaboration with Globaia. Feel free to use the maps on this page under Creative Commons conditions (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0); please contact me for further details – I also appreciate a notification if you use my maps. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

New York City: Mapping the melting pot

worldmapper — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 06:00:25 +0000

New York is the host city to this year’s AAG Annual Meeting. For my plenary presentation at the Population Specialty Group session I therefore decided to add a little bit of a local touch to the talk by including a new map of New York City in the slides. The work on the map came as I saw a colleague’s recent work on the population density of New York City, who also describes the data sets that I deployed in my map. The technique used for the map follows the principles of the gridded population cartogram for London.
The gridded population cartogram of New York City is a first step towards a more detailed approach to using cartograms as an alternative mapping solution for larger scale urban areas. The following map was created with the help of GIS data from the NYC Department of City Planning and small-area census data of the most recent census in 2010. The data then needed some additional processing to be suitable for a gridded cartogram transformation as described in my PhD thesis. The first version of this map uses a simple redistribution of population over a grid of 500×500 feet resolution. To create the map as a proof-of-concept, the census tracts provided sufficient accuracy to match that level of accuracy in most cases. Most census areas contained around 4-6 grid cells over which the population distribution was split in equal parts. Park and water areas without census data were embedded in the grid and were assigned 0 population values. For further improvements on the grid additional efforts would be desirable to improve on the accuracy and to eliminate errors that may result from the even redistribution, or even obtain a higher-resolution grid that allows for more detailed insights.
The population grid was then transformed using a diffusion-based method for creating density-equalising cartograms, with the population value being the determining value of the transformation, a method which is deployed in most maps on this website to date. The resulting gridded cartogram therefore is an equal-population projection in which each area on the map represents the same number of people. The transformed grid cells indicate, to what extent the number of people varies: The smaller a grid cell becomes, the fewer people live in that space, and the larger a grid cell becomes, the higher the population density is.
The following map shows the human shape of New York City, with each of the boroughs coloured differently for a better orientation. Although more detail such as subway lines or other key features may be necessary to fully read and understand the underlying geography, the variation of the grid in its simple form demonstrates the changing patterns of higher- and lower density areas of population, such as the disappearing Central Park in the middle of Manhattan, or the smaller because less-densely populated area of Staten Island:

(click for larger view)

This map provides the base for drawing a new geography of a diverse ‘melting pot‘ such as New York City. The human shape of New York puts in the center of the map, those elements that shape and form the real geography of a city.
More examples and the slideshow from my plenary at this year’s AAG will be added to my website soon.

The map on this page has been created by Benjamin D. Hennig of the SASI Research Group (University of Sheffield). We welcome the use of our maps under the Creative Commons conditions; please contact me for further details – we also appreciate a notification if you used our maps somewhere else. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

A Lonely Planet

worldmapper — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 05:00:41 +0000

‘How to Land a Jumbo Jet’ is the catchy title of a little book published by Lonely Planet a couple of month ago. The book is a “visual exploration of travel facts, figures and ephemera” and a “visual guide to the way we live, travel and inhabit the globe”. Edited by the British graphic designer Nigel Holmes, the book follows the increased interest in information graphics that started to flourish yet again with the increasing availability of ever growing amounts of data. This reminds a lot of the ‘Golden age of statistical graphics‘ from the 19th century, where we have seen a manifestation of the prospering achievements in statistical graphics and thematic maps that we take for granted nowadays.
Jumbo jet is a mixed bag of visualised information that fits in that renaissance with a wide-ranging look into (as one might expect from Lonely Planet) everything travel-related (some sample pages can be downloaded from the link at the end of this page). And what would a travel book be without maps? Certainly quite incomplete, which is why there are some maps included that provide a different look at the world than that one usually finds in travel literature. One example for that is my contribution on visualising the more remote parts of our planet – the lonely patches on the world’s land surface.
Drawing a map of the remote areas (as also described in my PhD thesis) it is not simply a matter of putting the less populated area of the world in the foreground. Transformed maps that show the human spaces, such as a gridded population cartogram, work very well because of the specific distribution of people in a very limited amount of space. With more than 95% of the world’s population living in approximately only 10% of the land area, the remaining 90% of the land area vanish from a gridded population cartogram. Reversing this therefore is much less striking, because 90% of the land surface is almost empty and would remain on a transformed cartogram, making it look much more like a conventional map projection. The optimal grid data for a gridded cartogram transformation thus needs a high variation and a data distribution that has the highest values for the topic of interest in a limited amount of grid cells, like the major population densities cover approximately 10% of the full grid. A different approach is therefore needed when looking at the loneliest places on the planet. Such an indicator is the relative distance of areas to the majority of people, which can be measured e.g. by travel times – most of the remotest places are also hardest to get to (apart from flying over it and jumping out of the plane, which is when Nigel Holmes’ infographic on how to land a jumbo jet from that book may come handy for the remaining passengers).
In an analysis of people’s closeness, Nelson points out that only 15% of people in rich countries live more than an hour of travel time from a city (of at least 50,000 people), while the same applies to 65% of people living in the poor countries of the world. The information about the absolute travel time from a given point can be transformed into a grid that translates remoteness into a quantifiable measure which combines the human and physical space in one layer. The gridded dataset can then be transformed according to the absolute travel time that is necessary to reach the nearest major city that was defined by Uchida & Nelson, the authors of the study, as one of the 8,518 cities with 50,000 or more people. The transformed grid thus shows each grid cell resized according to that absolute travel time that is needed from that grid cell to the nearest major city by land transport, giving the remotest places most space on the map.
The following gridded cartogram of the remotest places visualises the picture of a lonely planet where the spaces shown are those that are furthest away from those places of civilisation that define the 21st century. The map is resized according to the estimated land travel time to the nearest large city (over 50,000 inhabitants). Antarctica has not been included in the calculation, as there are no cities of that category. More than half of the world’s population according to UN estimates now lives in cities, and this map shows those places that most of the people living in the world need the longest time to get to. It draws an image of the areas that are almost disconnected from those shrinking effects of globalisation. This world map is the striking opposite representation of our image of a globalised and interconnected world, of those vanishing places that we thought do not exist anymore:

(click for larger view)

“Getting yourself to one of the remotest spots in the world doesn’t necessarily mean flying to a distant Pacific island surrounded by nothing but open ocean: Some continental locations can be days from the closest large city” (quote from the Huffington Post).
Want to get away? No, really get away? This map is your ultimate guide…

Other maps included in the Lonely Planet infographics book show the world population, world tourist destinations, and the most crowded air spaces on the planet. Further questions answered from the other graphics include the best place to experience a volcano, which nation is the proudest in the world, or why your luggage occasionally disappear on flights. How to land a jumbo jet can be ordered from the Lonely Planet website. Here are some examples from the book:

Download a pdf preview from the book

The map shown on this page has been created by Benjamin D Hennig and has been published by Lonely Planet. Contact me for further details on the use of my maps.

British News of the World

worldmapper — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 06:00:24 +0000

According to the British Guardian, 2011 was the year of the news overload, with many people perceiving the year’s news from around the world being extremely significant in manifold ways. “There is no news“, as reportedly broadcast by the BBC an a day in 1930, is an unlikely in our media age, but whether last year’s news were more significant than usual remains another question. It may just as well be a proof of an increasingly connected world where news become ever more instant and people demand new news virtually every second – the news overload of 2011 may therefore also be a result of the overload of news produced by the media (and demanded by the population).
Nevertheless, important events happened in 2011, just as in other years. Europe and an ongoing global financial crisis, the Arab Spring, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, to only mention a few of the events that made some headlines last year. To understand how people in the United Kingdom perceive the events from around the globe, one can look at how frequently a country has been mentioned in major news stories. Similar to the map published on this website last year (see here: British views of the world in 2010), the following maps show the world reshaped according to the number of news items on the website of the British Newspaper The Guardian (data derived from their Data store). The first map takes all the domestic news stories from the United Kingdom into consideration which results in a dominant appearance of the UK in this version of the map:

(click for larger map)

The world in 2011 as seen through British eyes can better be seen when taking the UK data out (the United Kingdom was tagged in 23588 content items on the Guardian website). There are some significant changes to the picture that emerged the year before: Although news from around the world still are hugely influenced by news from the USA (7377 items), the trend changed with a slight increase in the news coverage from European countries to reflect the importance of the Eurozone crisis. Nevertheless, the USA still are by far the most written-about country apart from Britain – the Anglo-american bias remains. The most significant change however is the rise of the Arab world in the news map for 2011. Libya (2498 news items) and Egypt (1381) are the countries with the highest increase in news items as compared to the same data from 2010 (only domestic stories from the UK are in the top three with 1454 more stories as compared to 2010). Other rising news coverage came from Japan (793 total items, with an increase of 470 items), Tunisia (479 with an increase of 461), and Italy (790, with an increase of 354). The following map shows the total news coverage of each of the countries outside the UK using the worldmapper colour scheme (which allows an easy comparison with the land area or the population map):

(click for larger map)

The following animation shows the changes that took place when looking at the world without the UK from 2010 to 2011 in direct comparison:

2012 will quite certainly bring another increase in domestic stories from the United Kingdom, with the Olympics and the Queen’s diamond jubilee coming up in an interesting year for the (still) United Kingdom, but what other changes we will see on the world map will remain less predictable – who would have anticipated the rise in news from the Arab world in 2011? More certain will be an ongoing news overload this year – no news won’t happen anytime soon again like back in 1930.

The maps on this page have been created by Benjamin Hennig and are property of the SASI Research Group (University of Sheffield). We welcome the use of our maps under the Creative Commons conditions; please contact us for further details – we also appreciate a notification if you used our maps somewhere else. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

In Focus: America’s Debt to the World

worldmapper — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 08:00:47 +0000

Amid Europe’s debt crisis it remains less noticed that the largest mountain of debt in the world is piled up across the big pond in the United States of America. The topic will be critically debated in US politics as presidential elections are due in 2012. In an article for the “In Focus” section of Political Insight (December 2011, Volume 2, Issue 3) Danny Dorling and I took a closer look at the foreign liabilities of America’s debt.
The map we created for this feature is a cartogram with the world’s countries resized according to the total amount of US treasury securities that are held in each country (as shown in data from July 2011). This is a preview of the maps that we created for the article:

Here are the bibliographic details:

Hennig, B. D. and Dorling, D. (2011). In Focus: America’s Debt to the World. Political Insight 2 (3): 34.
Article online (Wiley)

See more maps about debt here.

Views of Christmas

worldmapper — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 00:01:06 +0000

For 2011, this is it.
Merry Crisis and a Happy New Fear.
Thank you, and goodbye!

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Really, there is nothing else to come!
You can leave this website now.
Here is the exit…

London in Maps

worldmapper — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 04:00:40 +0000

London 2012 means a busy year for the British capital. Not only are the 2012 Olympics coming up, but also will London be part of the Diamond Jubilee celebrations, and on the more serious side, the current economic crisis will continue to have considerable impact on the people living in a city that is heavily reliant on the global financial markets. Although London is “by far the richest part of Britain and the engine of the national economy [, yet] it also has the highest rates of poverty and inequality” (more on these issues are highlighted in the latest release of London’s Poverty Profile). In the dawn of all these events, Londoners are also electing a new mayor and assembly to decide whom they want to see in the driving seat for the next four years.
The world of cartography and maps is paying its own contribution to this city with the London Mapping Festival. “The London Mapping Festival 2011–2012 is an 18 month programme of activities designed to promote the unique range of mapping, innovative technologies and applications that exist for the Capital. The festival will showcase all mapping-related disciplines including cartography, surveying, GIS, GPS and remote sensing” (quoted from the LMF website). As part of the cartographic community, the Sasi Research Group of the University of Sheffield is an active supporter of the LMF, and we have contributed one of our maps to the new book London in Maps: a changing perspective. It brings together a wide range of contributions to the LMF’s London Map Exhibition that was on display at a wide range of events during the last months, including the Mapping Showcase 2011 early December in the Emirates Stadium. The book has a wide range of highly detailed maps, charts and cartograms, artist impressions as well as aerial and satellite images ranging from the modern day back to the 17th century. A particular focus is made on maps and images from the last 20 years, giving it a modern cartographic flavour.
Our map of the Human Shape of London is a gridded population cartogram giving every person living in the city the same amount of space. Smaller grid cells indicate fewer people living there, while larger grid cells refer to the same amount of space in the real world, but with a much higher number of people living there. And although London is generally characterised by a very high urban population density,
the grid pattern shows some significant variation in the crowdedness between the London boroughs, and even within them. The following map is a simplified version of the original map printed in the book with a lower-resolution grid that provides a more generalised overview of the population patterns:

(click for larger view)

More cartographic impressions from the book can be found in this selection of sample pages (1.8 MB PDF). The book can be ordered vie the London Mapping Festival website:
London in Maps: a changing perspective, (ISBN: 978-0-9545270-2-0, pp 200, RRP £29.99 + p&p), is available online at http://www.londonmappingfestival.org/london-in-maps. Contributions on all sales will go to the the LMF charity, Map Action, in support of the excellent work they carry out in mapping disaster zones or in support of humanitarian programmes.

We created the gridded population cartogram of London for a wider range of socioeconomic mapping of the current state of London as part of a new research project of the Sasi Research Group where we look into geographical patterns of inequality in London. The project is funded by the Trust for London and the project will continue through 2012 to 2014.

The map has been created by Benjamin Hennig and is property of the SASI Research Group (University of Sheffield). We welcome the use of our maps under the Creative Commons conditions; please contact us for further details – we also appreciate a notification if you used our maps somewhere else. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

Material flows: The impact of global resource extraction

worldmapper — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 04:04:01 +0000

Climate change as discussed at the climate talks in Durban is just one of the complex impact that humans have on the natural environment. The history of humanity is closely linked to benefiting from (or exploiting) the natural environment in order to improve living conditions. “Stone, Iron, Bronze and Steel Ages – the names of these periods have been chosen according to the main materials in use“ (see materialflows.net). Over a long period in human history, this behaviour had only little impact on the environment from a global perspective (not least because there were much fewer people around). This has changed considerably since the industrial revolution started spreading across the globe from its British roots. “The industrial revolution marked a fundamental change of the energy system based on fossil fuels and saw the introduction of yet more materials. Coal, steel and aluminium allowed to tremendously increase output and efficiency. With the start of the commercial exploitation of crude oil in the late 19th century, the doors have been opened to a new era which one day might be called the ‘Oil Age’” (see materialflows.net). With growing populations, and an increasingly more intensive and extensive use of natural resources, the human impact on the environment has reached an unprecedented level which has such an impact that the environment becomes considerably transformed by human action. This led to the proclamation of a new geolocial era, the Anthropocene, which pays tribute to the “influence of human behavior on the Earth’s atmosphere in recent centuries“, which is said to be “so significant as to constitute a new geological era for its lithosphere” (quoted from Wikipedia).
Extraction of natural resources is one component of this change (amongst many other factors), which often stands at the beginning of the chain of changing and influencing the natural environment. Fossil fuels, minerals, metal ores, and other resources are taken out of their natural deposits, which already has an impact on the environment at the places where they are, and are then burned, processed, and eventually dumped in manifold transformed ways. Material extraction and the subsequent flows of them during their ‘human lifecycle’ (before we regard them as useless waste) are an important element in the understanding of our impact on the natural environment. “A dematerialisation strategy, i.e. a dramatic absolute reduction of our material consumption, will be inevitable – especially in industrialised countries – taking into account the concept of ‘environmental space’. This concept claims that the total amount of natural resources that humankind can use without damaging the global ecosystems is limited” (see materialflows.net).
In a collaboration with Worldmapper, the Materialflows project has released a series of cartograms as part of their online portal for material flow data which gives an insight into the shares and dimensions of global resource exploitation. On the basis of the MFA-database we created a series of cartograms where territories are re-sized to different categories of material flows. Here are two examples from the map series that demonstrate some of the aspects investigated in the project. The two maps show the total resource extraction and the fossil fuel extraction in 2007:
(click for larger map)

(click for larger map)

More maps and a lot more information about the topic can be found on www.materialflows.net, which “is an online portal for material flow data, providing access to material flow data sets on the national level. The website is based on the worldwide first comprehensive database on global resource extraction, set up and administrated by SERI (Sustainable Europe Research Institute) in cooperation with the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment, Energy. The database comprises data for more than 200 countries for the time period of 1980 to 2008, aggregated into 12 categories of material flows” (see materialflows.net).

The maps on this page have been created by Benjamin Hennig in collaboration with www.materialflows.net. We welcome the use of these maps under the Creative Commons conditions; please contact us for further details – we also appreciate a notification if you used our maps somewhere else. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

Saving tomorrow today? That was yesterday…

worldmapper — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 06:00:59 +0000

Starting today the world gathers in Durban for the COP17 climate change summit. In times where economic growth is more anticipated than a decline in carbon emissions, the prospects for a successful successor to the Kyoto protocol (coming to an end in 2012) is quite unlikely, and it will be interesting to see, what ‘success’ the delegates have to announce for saving the world from mad and often also tragic consequences of changing climate patterns.
The most recent complete views of global carbon emissions are still those released by the United Nations for 2008 which I updated using some additional information to reflect the impact of the global economic crisis in 2008/09 as part of an update to the series of worldmapper cartograms on carbon emissions. The following two maps are a reminder of these cartograms that demonstrate, how big the industrialised nations still are in their carbon emissions – only followed by those regions (namely China) that produced much of the goods that are consumed in the wealthier parts of the world.
Time for a change? That was before the crisis…the outcome of Durban 2011 could be a manifestation of this image – with absolute levels hardly declining (if at all):
Carbon Emissions 2009:

(click for larger version)
Animation CO2-Emissions 2006-2009:

The maps on this page have been created by Benjamin Hennig and are property of the SASI Research Group (University of Sheffield). We welcome the use of our maps under the Creative Commons conditions; please contact us for further details – we also appreciate a notification if you used our maps somewhere else. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

Landmines: A deadly inheritance

worldmapper — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 06:00:20 +0000

In a report released by the Landmine Monitor it is stated that landmine use is ‘highest since 2004′ despite record clearances. While with Burma (Myanmar), Israel, Lybia and Syria, four of the 20% of countries who did not sign an international treaty to stop the use of land mines, continued to use new devices this year (and further armed groups in countries such as Afghanistan, Colombia and Pakistan also laid new mines, as reported by the BBC), the deadly impact of these weapons reaches further than those countries. The following cartogram shows the casualties from mines, explosive remnants of war (ERW) and cluster submunition as recorded by the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which aims to bring the use of landmines to an end. A total of 4,191 casualties were recorded in 2010.
(click for larger map)

The distribution of these deaths shows, that the legacy of landmines is a persistent one that requires urgent action and a revived global awareness for the long-term problems associated with these weapons. The implications of the report will be discussed on the 11th Meeting of the States Parties to the Mine Ban Treaty next week in Cambodia. To decades after its inaugural event, the meeting returns to its birthplace, providing “a chance for the international community to recall how far the world has come in pursuing a comprehensive end to the suffering and casualties caused by anti-personnel mines“.

Regarding the data accuracy, the report findings state that the “slight increase in recorded casualties is not yet indicative of a trend, due to poor quality of casualty data in some countries. The 2010 total is, however, lower than the 5,502 casualties recorded for 2008. Due to incomplete data collection, the actual number of casualties was certainly higher than what was recorded” (Source: major findings of the Landmine Monitor 2010-11).
As a reference, the following image shows the original map as published in the ICBL report:

The first map on this page has been created by Benjamin D. Hennig and is property of the Sasi Research Group (University of Sheffield). We welcome the use of our maps under the Creative Commons conditions; please contact us for further details – we also appreciate a notification if you used our maps somewhere else. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

57 million deaths

worldmapper — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 00:01:10 +0000

People are dying all the time. Wars are just one of the many causes of death, but certainly one of the more avoidable ones. WHO’s Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study is the key publication containing global health statistics which can help to understand the relevance of geography in relation to the mortality patterns and the prevalence of certain diseases. The most recent update is currently in preparation (set for publication in 2012). Gathering this data is an enormous task: “GBD found that only about a third of all deaths worldwide occurring annually are recorded in government vital registration schemes. India and China have sample registration systems. India has records for particular urban and rural areas, which are assumed to be typical of their urban and rural populations. China’s figures are based on a 10 yearly household survey, where information on deaths in the previous 12 months is asked for. If these are considered to provide information on their whole populations, then around 72% of causes of deaths worldwide are known from death registration data.” (see more about the data on worldmapper).
Data about deaths were some of the most recent additions to the worldmapper website, where we did an extensive mapping of all causes of death and the ages of death. The map series covers all approximately 57 million deaths occuring every year on this planet according to the previous release of the GBD study (meanwhile this figure will have changed slightly, but the proportions that are displayed in the worldmapper cartograms will still show a quite valid picture of the distribution of deaths). These maps are featured in an online lecture by Danny Dorling (see here), and we have now created a map animation on YouTube that shows these maps from different perspectives:
The first part of the following video clip shows the deaths occurring in 5-year age groups, highlighting the unequal distribution of early deaths in the poorer parts of the world, while the most wealthy nations have the largest shares of people dying at a very high age. The second part shows the same maps, but now each age group in its real proportion to the number of deaths occurring in each age group. Striking is the fact, that infant mortality is by far the largest age group of deaths occurring in the world (more than 8 million deaths every year). The numbers then go down to a low in the group of 10-14 year old’s (more than 500,000 dying in that age group), to start rising gradually from the age of 15 again. The second peak is then between 70 and 80 year old’s, with almost 5.5 million dying in both of the five-year cohorts in that range). Less than 100,000 – the lowest number – make it to an age of over 100 before they die. The third part of the clip concentrates on the causes of death, which are categorised by groups of diseases and other causes of death. One interesting fact here is that less than 10% (slightly more than 5 million) are dying from non-disease related deaths (such as accidents, wars, murder, or suicide – figures like war deaths will be the most variable in their distribution over the years, and the 2002 snapshot displayed in these maps can only be an example for the distribution o). By far the most deaths occurring are related to some form of illness or disease. The causes themselves show another striking importance of geographic location, with almost no cause of death being distributed equally among the world’s population. Death and disease are an issue of global inequalities in health, what the following maps strikingly show:

Further reading and more visuals related to the topic can be found on the following pages on this website:

Child Malnutrition

Heart disease in the United Kingdom

Malaria Deaths 2010

Presentation: Ill-health on the cheap?

Presentation: Making visible global injustice in health

This map animation has been created by Benjamin D. Hennig using material created by the worldmapper team. All material is property of the Sasi Research Group (University of Sheffield). We welcome the use of our maps under the Creative Commons conditions; please contact us for further details – we also appreciate a notification if you used our maps somewhere else. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

A Nuclear Planet

admin — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 08:00:45 +0000

We are back in the blame game: A report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is warning that “Iran appears to be on a structured path to building a nuclear weapon”. Are they…are they not? The possession of nuclear weapons is a well kept secret, also for those countries that are known to be part of the club of world nuclear forces. The Federation of American Scientists states that “the exact number of nuclear weapons in each country’s possession is a closely held national secret. Despite this limitation, however, publicly available information and occasional leaks make it possible to make best estimates about the size and composition of the national nuclear weapon stockpiles”. Using their data suggests, that there may be a total inventory of about 20,500 nuclear weapons that separates us from the vision of a nuclear-free world outlined by US President Obama in 2009 (meanwhile, priorities appear to have changed, with expert outlines for steps toward a nuclear-free world having been moved to an archive of the US foreign policy website). The reality looks very different, and Iran would only be one more member in a bipolar world that still very much reflects the nuclear arms race of the cold war. The following map is an update to the Worldmapper Nuclear Weapons cartogram using the 2011 estimates for the possession of nuclear weapons by the FAS:

(click for larger map)

Not much has changed in the last decade, and more efforts that visionary statements will be needed to achieve a nuclear weapon free world. The recent news are certainly not part of that plan…
The map on this page has been created by Benjamin D. Hennig and is property of the Sasi Research Group (University of Sheffield). We welcome the use of our maps under the Creative Commons conditions; please contact us for further details – we also appreciate a notification if you used our maps somewhere else. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

Rediscovering the World: Gridded Cartograms of Human and Physical Space

worldmapper — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 00:01:12 +0000

‘We need new maps’ is the central claim made in my PhD thesis. In a world increasingly influenced by human action and interaction, we still rely heavily on mapping techniques that were invented to discover unknown places and explore our physical environment. Although the traditional concept of a map is currently being revived in digital environments, the underlying mapping approaches are not capable of making the complexity of human-environment relationships fully comprehensible. Starting from how people can be put on the map in new ways, this thesis outlines the development of a novel technique that stretches a map according to quantitative data, such as population. The new maps are called gridded cartograms as the method is based on a grid onto which a density-equalising cartogram technique is applied. The underlying grid ensures the preservation of an accurate geographic reference to the real world. It allows the gridded cartograms to be used as basemaps onto which other information can be mapped. This applies to any geographic information from the human and physical environment. As demonstrated through the examples presented in this thesis, the new maps are not limited to showing population as a defining element for the transformation, but can show any quantitative geospatial data, such as wealth, rainfall, or even the environmental conditions of the oceans. The new maps also work at various scales, from a global perspective down to the scale of urban environments. The gridded cartogram technique is proposed as a new global and local map projection that is a viable and versatile alternative to other conventional map projections. The maps based on this technique open up a wide range of potential new applications to rediscover the diverse geographies of the world. They have the potential to allow us to gain new perspectives through detailed cartographic depictions.

The thesis is now available on the White Rose Etheses archive and can also be obtained via the EThOS archive of the British Library.

Hennig, Benjamin D (2011). Rediscovering the World: Gridded Cartograms of Human and Physical Space. PhD thesis, University of Sheffield.
Download as PDF (30 MB)

My PhD research has been funded by

Planet of People: From 2.5 to 10 billion in 150 years

worldmapper — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 00:01:58 +0000

7 billion…
…and counting.

The world’s population has reached the symbolic milestone of adding another billion to this planet, accompanied by some interesting media coverage over the last months about various aspects that relate to the implications of a growing world population (see e.g. this BBC feature and this National Geographic series). While 7 billion is a static number, the expansion and distribution of the world’s population is a very dynamic issue that a single map of where these 7 billion are living (as shown on this website back in July) does not do full justice of what is happening on the planet of people. A lot has changed from the 2.5 billion people that lived on the planet in the middle of the last century to today’s 7 billion, moving the gravitational centre of people considerably towards Asia. This has now started turning towards the African continent, which has not only been a considerable part of the global population growth over the last quarter of the century (and is therefore home to a large share of the world’s children), but is expected outnumber Asian population growth considerably in the decades to come.
The following cartogram-map animation shows these changing trends between 1950 and 2100. It is based on United Nations probabilistic population projections of total fertility from the 2010 Revision of the World Population Prospects. From the year 2010, the data is based on a future projection of expected population changed. “To project the population until 2100, the United Nations Population Division uses assumptions regarding future trends in fertility, mortality and international migration. Because future trends cannot be known with certainty, a number of projection variants are produced” (quoted from the WPP documentation). I used the data from the probabilistic median variant, in which the population is expected to grow to approximately 10 billion by the year 2100 (see below for a graph of the different scenarios produced by the UN). The animation therefore shows the changing distributions of population between the different countries (note that South Sudan is not included in the estimates; Sudan is therefore treated as one country in this map), with Europe losing large shares of population in total as well as in relation to the rest of the world, while the dominance of Asia slowly starts to be relativised by the increasing population shares on the African continent, making the changes in the Americas almost insignificant from a global perspective:

(click for larger map)
See also the (static) world population cartogram for this year

Apparently, this animation outlines one possible scenario how the global population shifts may develop over the next 90 years. It may all come very different, and depending on what assumptions one makes about our behavior of how we reproduce ourselves, we could as well start becoming less people much earlier – or continue to grow exponentially. The UN Population Prospects takes different scenarios into account, of which the above animation shows the median prospects. The other variations of how the world’s population may develop can also be assessed in further detail as shown above. The following graph gives an overview of the different projections, and the detailed data can be obtained from the UN WPP website (see http://esa.un.org/wpp/unpp/panel_population.htm).

With 7 billion marking another milestone in our presence on the planet, old debates about the maximum sustainable human population will come up once again, often diffusely mixed with discussion about migration and overpopulation on a national level (yet they have often been proven wrong before).
Maybe there will be 10 billion of our species around in 2100. Maye much fewer, or even more. Perhaps we should be less obsessed by counting and predicting our growth (and decline), but about the things that really matter. Whether we are too many or even too few depends a lot on how we live our lives on this planet. There could be enough space, and enough resources for all of us, we just have to live slightly less stupid in some parts of the world to make us all a bit more happy.
The map animation on this page has been created by Benjamin D. Hennig and is property of the Sasi Research Group (University of Sheffield). We welcome the use of our maps under the Creative Commons conditions; please contact us for further details – we also appreciate a notification if you used our maps somewhere else. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

Open Access Week 2011

worldmapper — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 08:00:37 +0000

The Open Access Week goes into its fifth year in 2011, promoting Open Access as a new norm in scholarship and research. It takes place from October 24 to 30 in many places around the globe.

“This year, programs highlighting publishing and rights management choices for faculty authors, use of new media, and opportunities created by re-mixing and re-using scholarly materials are on tap. Open Educational Resources are another key topic, as is open-source technology” (see more details in the 2011 announcement).

In collaboration with SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), who are the organisers of the event, I have created an updated map of this year’s activities around the world. It connects to the map that we created last year for the 2010 event. The map shows a picture of the world according to the number of planned activities to be organised by country along forthcoming Open Access Week. Comparing this picture to last year, it can be seen that the participation in the event is slowly changing and very similar to last year. Comparing this picture to the proportion of scientific papers produced in the world (as shown on worldmapper), this picture can be seen as a welcoming trend for a higher awareness for free accessibility of the knowledge that is produced in the wealthier world. The importance of Open Access in the poorer parts of the world, as reflected in next week’s OA2011 activities in India and parts of Africa, are as important as the awareness for Open Access in general, as this can help to make research from those countries visible and accessible in a wider context (read more about this topic in Pablo de Castro’s contribution in the BioMed Blog).

(click for larger map)

Academic publications should be available for the world to read, to learn from, to build upon.
(Ben Adida)

The countries we work with can’t afford journals; they’re already paying an arm and a leg for textbooks.
(Sir John Daniel)

The least we should expect is that the outputs of this tax-payer funded activity should be freely available to all.
(Martin Weller)

The above quotes were taken from the compilation Why Open Access? created by Alex Holcombe.

Update:
BioMed Central brought to my attention that the Open Access Africa 2011 speaker presentations, images and poster abstracts are now available online. They write about the event: “Open Access Africa 2011, a free BioMed Central and Computer Aid International event, was hosted at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, Ghana, during Open Access Week 2011.
All presentations, delivered by representatives from Google, British Medical Journal (BMJ), Department for International Development (DFID), Pan African Medical Journal and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa(UNECA), are now available online, together with conference images and poster abstracts. Videos of all presentations will follow shortly.
The conference, now in its second year, discussed open access publishing in an African context and the diverse programme offered insights from library, funding and technology perspectives as part of Open Access Africa, a collection of initiatives designed to increase the output and visibility of scientific research published by African learning institutes. The birth of Sudan’s first Institutional Repository, created by the University of Khartoum, was a direct result of a meeting held last year at Open Access Africa 2010. What further developments will be sparked by this year’s event?
Dr. Tobias I. Ndubuisi Ezejiofor, one of the attending delegates, commented, ‘For us in Africa, open access means liberation from information inhibitions and from research/publication visibility clouds. Indeed the trappings and benefits of open access can hardly be over estimated that I am sufficiently led to say: ‘I see a great future for quality research and publication outputs for and from African scientists and professionals through the open access initiative.’”
Find all details and material on the BioMed Central website and help ensure a better future for African science.

The map on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig in collaboration with Pablo de Castro of Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). We welcome the use of the map under Creative Commons conditions (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0); please contact us for further details – we also appreciate a notification if you used our maps somewhere else. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

Fair Play

worldmapper — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 06:00:21 +0000

The recent protests over the economic crisis gained wider attention with the Occupy Wall Street movement and sparked similar actions across the globe over the weekend. Besides a critique of the financial institutions and the banking sector, the demonstrations are also an expression of the uncertain living conditions that many people feel exposed to in an economically bleak time. They are also a reflection of the growing gaps within the societies of the wealthier world, where the poorest and richest parts of the society increasingly drift apart. This is a trend that the protesters see as unfair and problematic.
Fair Play is a new book which “brings together a selection of highly influential writings [that] look at inequality and social justice, why they matter and what they are. [...] ‘Fair Play’ provides evidence that Britain is becoming more politically, socially and economically divided whilst coming together in terms of educational outcomes and reduced segregation by ethnicity” (see more information on the book website).
Of the 52 chapters written by Danny Dorling, two have been co-authored by me: The first is a discussion of the influence of inequality on the educational mobility within the two very different school systems of England and Germany (chapter 20: Educational mobility in England and Germany). This graph taken from the book gives an overview of the prevailing differences not only between the two, but also other selected countries that indicate a correlating trend between a wealth divide within a country and the ability to overcome educational hurdles:

Social Mobility and Income Inequality

The second contribution focuses on the creation of the gridded world population cartogram (chapter 51: Remapping the world’s population: visualizing data using cartograms). It explains the basic principles for the creation of gridded cartograms and discusses the differences to other cartograms and other map projections. The following maps are taken from this chapter:

From top to bottom:Worldmapper Population cartogram, Gridded World Population Cartogram, Gridded Population Cartogram of the US mainland

The book features a multitude of other figures, all of which can also be viewed online in the image gallery of the book’s website. Fair Play by Danny Dorling is published by the Policy Press and is available e.g. at Amazon.

The Human Shape of Germany in HD

worldmapper — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 02:00:00 +0000

Maps of Germany’s population have become a regular feature on this website, starting with the first version of a topographical display of the gridded population cartogram of the country in 2009 to the more detailed analysis of population densities and demographic trends at the 20th anniversary of the reunification last year. One year on, as one of the economic strongholds Germany is in the spotlight of the financial turmoil in the Eurozone. When following the populist media, Germany’s population itself appears to be more unified than ever, at least in the question of the euro bailout.
Putting politics aside, it’s time to look at the German population once again.

(click for larger map)

The map on this page has been created by Benjamin D. Hennig and is property of the Sasi Research Group (University of Sheffield). We welcome the use of our maps under the Creative Commons conditions; please contact us for further details – we also appreciate a notification if you used our maps somewhere else. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

The Pearl River Delta: A City of Cities

worldmapper — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 04:30:59 +0000

Earlier this year the British Telegraph Newspaper published a story about the creation of a new megacity in the Chinese Pearl River delta region. “China is planning to create the world’s biggest mega city by merging nine cities to create a metropolis twice the size of Wales with a population of 42 million”, the opener of their story stated. The region mentioned here is an area covering the cities of Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Donggaun, Foshan, Huizhou, Zhaoqing, Jiangmen, Zhongshan and Zhuhai (as described in the China Urban Development Blog). The story was quickly picked up by many news sources back then, while Chinese officials were quick to deny the reports. Stories like this show, how urbanisation and megacities have become a buzz word, and are used especially in relation to the emerging economies in Asia in order to picture these – for western-centric eyes unbelievably – large and still growing populations in the most urbanised regions on the planet. A few thoughts on the relevance of megacities in their global context have been published on this website before (related to the map of the world’s megacities).
With special regard to the Telegraph story I have drawn another map showing the population distribution of China (based on 2010 Data from the Chinese Census and from estimates of SEDAC’s GPW database) and highlighted the Pearl River Delta region in this map. The equal-population map shows a gridded population cartogram in which every grid cell is resized according to the total number of people living there. This map makes the plans of a more integrated Pearl River Delta region more understandable, and perhaps slightly less exciting for those who interpreted the news as the creation of a new megacity, rather than the logical step in connecting an already populous region.

(click for larger map)

The Pearl River Delta megacity will certainly never be one large megacity, but more a city of cities, which is so populated that further planning measures for such a huge urban space is inevitable if this region wants to continue to be successful economically. As written in the Economist, “what the Chinese effort actually seems to entail is a significant improvement in transportation around the region, harmonised local policies, and a rationalised metropolitan system of governance“.
While China is also planning and building whole new cities, some of which are much larger than many cities in Europe (and some of which turn into giant ghost towns), the Pearl River Delta is less an example for these developments, but, as Matthew Yglesias points out, can even serve as a good example for urban and regional planning in other parts of the world. Once again, a lesson from China to the USA, where megaurban regions such as the LA metropolitan region and the Bay Area on the west coast, or the urban corridor along the east coast could perhaps be much more efficient and sustainable if they were to implement a more coherent infrastructure. Other similarly polycentric metropolitan regions have realised this while they were faced with the decline of old industries, such as the Germany’s Rhine-Ruhr region.
Urbanisation has many faces, and the economic prospects may be decided by administrative decisions over the urban development. Large cities are not needed for prosperity, but where there are such agglomerations, it may be a wise step to actively support their functionality by planning sustainable infrastructures. But we should all calm down a little – not every buzz makes a sensible story, and many of the realities making headlines are not so new at all, as the above map shows.
The map on this page has been created by Benjamin D. Hennig and is property of the Sasi Research Group (University of Sheffield). We welcome the use of our maps under the Creative Commons conditions; please contact us for further details – we also appreciate a notification if you used our maps somewhere else. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

In Focus: Global Population Shifts

worldmapper — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 05:00:20 +0000

According to recent estimates by the UN, the world’s population will reach 7 billion some time this year, and rise to over 10 billion by 2100. In an article for the “In Focus” section of Political Insight (September 2011, Volume 2, Issue 2) Danny Dorling and I show where the population is growing and where it is declining.
The map we created for this feature shows not only the growth and decline in relation to the global population distribution, but also highlights the places that are in growth an decline in two separate maps. This is a preview of the maps that we created for the article:

Here are the bibliographic details:

Dorling, D. and Hennig, B. D. (2011). In Focus: Global Population Shifts. Political Insight2 (2): 34.
Article online (Wiley)

Population has been in the focus of numerous maps on this website.
See more of them here.

When does it always rain on us?

worldmapper — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 04:30:18 +0000

Where rain (or more precisely: precipitation) is affecting most people, and where it falls mainly on uninhabited land has been part of the presentation that I gave at this year’s SoC meeting in Plymouth (where the delegates witnessed some of the rain from the maps shown below, but enjoyed a little bit of the late summer’s sunshine as well). An animation of these maps and the annual precipitation map have been published on this website last week (see here).
The following series of maps shows monthly precipitation patterns derived from monitored climate data of approximately 50 years (1950-2000, data obtained from http://worldclim.org/). The underlying popoulation grid is a gridded cartogram transformation of the global population distribution population data from SEDAC). As explained in more detail in the previous entry, this representation is a view of how the world’s population is directly exposed to the monthly precipitation patterns, shrinking all those unpopulated parts of the land surface while proportionally increasing the size of land according to the total number of people living there. The choropleth overlay visualises precipitation just as in a conventional map (also shown in the inset map. This shows, when it rains on humanity throughout the year – month by month:

January

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February

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March

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April

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May

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June

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July

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August

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Now it comes to the month we are currently in. From a global perspective, we can now see the slow retreat of the Asian monsoon, which still is still influencing the region but should now slow down and bring the dryer seasons in the forthcoming months. In North America, Hurricane season has started with some significant amounts of rain along the east coast already. And in the UK, we start to get a little bit more wet while the remains of those hurricanes head east over the Atlantic.

September

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October

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November

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December

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To complete the picture of this map series, the following map again shows the annual precipitation in the same projection. The scale is adjusted to the higher total annual rates – the map is basically an addition of the precipitation amounts of all the single maps shown above. While the annual map helps us to understand the relation of human population patterns in relation to population (which can partly be explained by climate conditions, although that is only one small part of explaining where people live), the monthly maps give us a much better picture of the variation and the changing conditions thoughout the year: Some places like the tropics hvaing large amounts of rain get this evenly throughout the year, while other parts, such as the Asian monsoon regions receive most of their precipitation in a comparably short amount of thime. Only the combination of both views can help us to understand the full picture of where and when precipitation is important for the world’s population.

Annual Precipitation

(click for larger map)

An animated version of these maps can be watched on YouTube.
The maps on this page have been created by Benjamin D. Hennig and are property of the Sasi Research Group (University of Sheffield). We welcome the use of our maps under the Creative Commons conditions; please contact us for further details – we also appreciate a notification if you used our maps somewhere else. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

Where does it always rain on us?

worldmapper — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 11:30:27 +0000

Does it never rain in Southern California? And can we find the rain in Spain mainly in the plain? And what does that all mean for the people living in these places? Where does rain matter most for the population? In some places, it can be a much needed scarcity, elsewhere it appears in a much dreaded surplus. Wherever it is falling, rain matters a lot where people are. Partly, the global population distribution can be explained by climate patterns, with rain being a crucial factor for the agriculture in a region. In my presentation for the delegate’s session at this year’s 47th annual meeting of the British Society of Cartographers in Plymouth I took a closer look at the weather, or to be more precise, at climate patterns and their visualisation using gridded cartograms. Part of the presentation was an animation showing the global precipitation patterns projected on a gridded population cartogram. The following map shows the annual precipitation in relation to the global population distribution. The small map inset gives the conventional view of the same data, demonstrating how the perspective changes when seeing the same topic from two different views:

(click for larger map)

The annual precipitation map shows, how most of the dry regions on the planet vanish when people are in the main focus of the map projection. Only few places show significant numbers of people living there, such as the Nile river delta region – which provides water (and fertile land) from the ground rather than from above. Regions affected by the monsoon rain in South and Southeast Asia in contrast are heavily populated, as this regular climate event provides the livelihood for wet rice agriculture and feeds billions of the world’s population.
More detailed interpretation of where and when most of the annual precipitation fall onto how many of us is possible, when viewing the data on a monthly basis using the same gridded population projection (using population data from SEDAC). Just as the above map, the following map animation visualises the precipitation data from 1950 to ~2000 to give a picture of the current climate conditions (precipitation data obtained from http://worldclim.org/). After the introductory annual image the animation shows month-by-month how the seasonal precipitation trends of affect the
world population (note the different scale for the total amount of rain between the annual and the monthly maps). Many details can be understood in their relation to people: the winter rains in the (European and North American) Mediterranean climates are still visible, as these are popular (and populous) places not only for holidaymakers. And large parts of the population in the northern hemisphere are exposed to some quite dry months throughout the year, something that the annual picture does not show sufficiently, but what is revealed in the monthly images. Similarly striking is the effect of the Asian Monsoon season that affects large parts of the world’s population. Many other details become apparent when watching the following animation more than once (and best in HD resolution):
The video animation is also available on YouTube. The full series of maps from this animation will be added to this website next week. The remaining series of precipitation maps shown at SoC11 will also be added at a later time. Drop me a line if you attended the presentation and are interested in seeing the second part before it goes online here.
The map and animation on this page has been created by Benjamin D. Hennig and the material is property of the Sasi Research Group (University of Sheffield). We welcome the use of our maps under the Creative Commons conditions; please contact us for further details – we also appreciate a notification if you used our maps somewhere else. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

Let the sunshine in: Picturing a Solar World

worldmapper — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 06:00:36 +0000

British people are said to have an obsession for the weather. Therefore it is not surprising that weather stories have a common place in the media. A recent article in the Guardian’s Weatherwatch series (read more in Weatherwatch: Forget the Balearics – come to Bognor) was searching for the sunniest place in Britain. People living across the Channel may be quite surprised to hear that the concept of sunshine is known (or at least, does exist) in Britain, but it does. British holidaymakers may have actually been much better off staying on the island, rather than heading towards the European continent, as it turned out to be a quite wet summer 2011 there (but the records claim that it wasn’t much better on the British Isles either…).
Globally seen, and with a slightly more scientific twist, there is of course quite a lot sunshine in the northern hemisphere during the (northern) summer months. NASA Earth Obersavations regularly releases data of the solar insolation (the intensity of the sunlight that reaches the earth surface) on a monthly basis (see here for the data source and further details). The original NASA image (included in the below map as an inset) shows “where and how much sunlight fell on Earth’s surface during the time period indicated. Scientists call this measure solar insolation. Knowing how much of the Sun’s energy reaches the surface helps scientists understand weather and climate patterns as well as patterns of plant growth around our world. Solar insolation maps are also useful to engineers who design solar panels and batteries designed to convert energy from the Sun into electricity to power appliances in our homes and work places. [...] The colors in these maps show how much sunlight (in Watts per square meter) fell on the Earth’s surface during the given time period” (quoted from NEO).
I used their data for a more experimental approach to visualise the most recent solar insolation (showing data for July 2011) using a gridded cartogram transformation. Instead of transforming people, the following cartogram resizes each grid cell according to the total energy of incoming sunlight reaching the land surface during the month July 2011. The cartogram shows the dominance of sunlight in the northern hemisphere during the northern summer season in the month just after the summer solstice. The seasonal variation of sunshine and the different distribution of sunlight between the northern and southern half of the planet become visible in their quantitative distribution. The northern landmasses are oddly bulging out of the map, while Antarctica disappears in the dark of the polar winter:

(click for larger map)

Data credits: Reference image (see map inset) by Jesse Allen, NASA Earth Observatory, based on FLASHFlux data. FLASHFlux data are produced using CERES observations convolved with MODIS measurements from both the Terra and Aqua satellite. Data provided by the FLASHFlux team, NASA Langley Research Center. The data has been edited and modified to be suitable for a cartogram transformation.

The map is a conceptual map that gives a first idea of the suitability of gridded cartogram transformations for other quantitative dimensions than only population. For the topic of solar insolation, it may now for example be interesting to collect annual data and do a corresponding transformation that takes the changes of the seasons into account. While this map here may at a first glance be quite surprising with a considerable size being existent on the northern hemisphere, this distribution will change towards the land areas around the equator. For the moment, this map gives a snapshot-view of the (northern) summer 2011, and those who felt it wasn’t that much of a summer should see that there was still some sunshine around in most places. Our perception of weather is as much a part of the weather stories as the weather itself.
Talking about the weather…more weather stories can be seen (and heard) in my presentation during the delegate’s session at the SoC 2011. Some of the material can now be found here.
The map on this page has been created by Benjamin D. Hennig and is property of the Sasi Research Group (University of Sheffield). We welcome the use of our maps under the Creative Commons conditions; please contact us for further details – we also appreciate a notification if you used our maps somewhere else. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

$54 Trillion: An In-debt View of the World

worldmapper — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 09:00:44 +0000

Soaring debts and plummeting stocks – the financial state of world hasn’t changed a lot in the last years. With debt levels continuing to rise, and economic activity stagnating, the impact appears to lead to yet another financial crisis (isn’t it the same crisis that we are in for three years now?). The following cartogram shows the countries of the world resized to their total public debt in 2011 as estimated by the IMF (data taken from the World Economic Outlook 2011, with additional data from EUROSTAT and other IMF publications). To put the total values into perspective, the countries are coloured by the public debt to GDP ratio (see below for a worldmapper-coloured version of the same map). The small reference map shows the estimated GDP output in 2011, allowing a comparison of global distribution of public debt and the distribution of economic activity:

(click for larger map)

9030 miles high, that alone is the pile of America’s debt in $100 bills, how graphics designer Nigel Holes explained quite nicely in a recent episode of BBC Radio 4′s number-geeks programme More or Less (the US debt clock may also appeal to the number geeks). This is a lot more than the pile of debt made in a similar calculation by US President Ronald Reagen in 1981, who stacked the US debt in $1000 bills and only reached 67 miles high (670 miles in $100 bills…). Quite interesting to get an idea of the dimensions of debt are also the visualisations on http://usdebt.kleptocracy.us/ where the US debt is compared to piles of money in relation to other things such as the Statue of Liberty (more about this can also be seen and read in last week’s map).
The USA was not the only country to be haunted by the attention of credit rating agencies and panicking investors on the world’s stock markets. Together with more and more countries in the Eurozone, the USA is the large part of the world’s wealthiest nations getting into difficulties over their public overspending. It’s not that this all comes out of surprise, because most of the numbers shown in the map are out and known for a while, as public overspending started long ago and accelerated latest with the financial crisis in 2008. Gambling on market’s ups and downs is part of the mechanics of the financial world. Public debt is part of that world, as countries have to borrow their money from these very same markets that tumbled in 2008, and where psychology plays an as important role as economics.
Speculations about France’s financial problems therefore did not come out of the blue. They are part of the gamble, and France’s public debt is high enough (in total and in GDP shares) that flatlining economic figures cause another worry for those still having money to lend to others. Who is next? The UK? Or even Germany? It’s near beyond the moon, literally: World’s public debt levels stacked in $1 bills would reach to the moon – not one time, but almost 14 times: According to the IMF data that I used for this map, the total public debt of all countries combined sums up to an estimated $54 trillion in 2011 (which equals 3.402 miles of $1 bills – 13.9 times the distance to the moon – or 34,020 miles of $100 bills – which could be wrapped 1.4 times around the world when put on a stack). The largest debtors (beyond the USA and France, who are already making the headlines, this also includes the UK and Germany in the European Union) have a public debt of more than three quarters of their annual GDP output.
So again, where next? Is Nouriel Roubini of New York University’s Stern School of Business right? And if so, where does a G-Zero world head economically if it is true what Roubini says:

Today, the United States lacks the resources to continue as the primary provider of global public goods. Europe is fully occupied for the moment with saving the eurozone. Japan is likewise tied down with complex political and economic problems at home. None of these powers’ governments has the time, resources, or domestic political capital needed for a new bout of international heavy lifting. Meanwhile, there are no credible answers to transnational challenges without the direct involvement of emerging powers such as Brazil, China, and India. Yet these countries are far too focused on domestic development to welcome the burdens that come with new responsibilities abroad. (Quoted from ‘A G-Zero World‘)

If the world is playing “a game in which my win is your loss“, then any collaborative efforts will never lead to a sustainable solution. If we are all in this together, we have to act together, not against each other.
As the following worldmapper-style view of the world’s public debt levels shows in comparison to the population and wealth distribution (small map on the bottom right), it is a small share of the global population bringing the world into a deep financial mess. The richest nations take a huge gamble, while the economic livelihoods of the large populations in the economically disadvantaged parts of the world suffer disproportionally high from the consequences (“No country, however, is spared from the consequences of
the downturn. The impact on developing countries is even greater”, quoted from an IPC paper).

(click for larger map)

The world is changing. To make it the change for a better, we probably have to start to see things in their interrelation, so see that riots and tumbling markets, and further beyond our doorstep, also famines, wars, and many other tragedies, are all connected in one or another way. It’s today’s challenge of geography to make sense of these dimensions of the world that we still don’t fully comprehend. Will we ever be able to create a more responsible, just and humane planet?

And now calm all down (, dears) and start doing something sensible. Together.
The maps on this page have been created by Benjamin D. Hennig and are property of the Sasi Research Group (University of Sheffield). We welcome the use of our maps under the Creative Commons conditions; please contact us for further details – we also appreciate a notification if you used our maps somewhere else. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

The World of America’s Debt

worldmapper — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 08:00:32 +0000

The financial crisis continues to make it into the headlines. Mountains of debt piled up by the world’s wealthiest nations (as shown in this map) stir up the financial markets and indicate that political measures since the early days of the economic meltdown in 2008 had little impact or simply were too meaningless to induce a real change into the mechanisms of the markets. The EU keeps struggling to calm investors over fears of yet another country going bust while on the other side of the pond the rating agencies start playing games with the world’s largest economy. As the NYT explains, The rating agency thinks the United States has too much debt, or at least will: “Under our revised base case fiscal scenario — which we consider to be consistent with a AA+ long-term rating and a negative outlook — we now project that net general government debt would rise from an estimated 74 percent of G.D.P. by the end of 2011 to 79 percent in 2015 and 85 percent by 2021.” (read more about credit agency ratings in the A ‘AAA’ Q. and A.). After some brief debates about credit agencies not long ago, these discussions seem to have disappeared again, and the old mechanisms of nervous investors and even more nervous decision makers, like it always did in the last three years.
At the same time an emerging super power starts to find its own political voice against its perhaps largest rival: After years of growing economic dominance, China seems to gain confidence in confronting the USA with bold statements. As the largest holder of US debt, they may start to worry with the investors’ decline in trust in America, causing China to warn America over its addiction to debt.
The current American debt levels did not come out of the blue, but have long started piling up, as a look at the development of US debt over the last decade shows: The total national debt of the United States is at $14.3 trillion this year, up from $5.8 trillion in 2001. Particularly interesting for the global markets is the external debt that the USA owes to foreign holders outside the country. Here George W. Bush took over approximately $1 trillion in foreign debt from the Clinton administration (Bill Clinton managed to induce a reduction in national debt levels in his second term). After a short period in which this downward trend continued, foreign US debt started to rise after September 2001, and Bush handed over more than $3 trillion of National debt to Barak Obama in 2009, with a considerable trend upwards since the financial crisis hit the nation in 2008. Only recently this upward trend started to level off slightly, and foreign debt is now just below $4.5 trillion. Besides China, as the largest single holder of foreign US debt, the liabilities are spread around the globe, with a considerable amount of debt being held by some of the other indebted economies such as the United Kingdom (as the country with the largest external debt of European countries). The following map shows the countries of the world resized according to the total amount of US treasury securities that are held in that country. It uses the most recent data published by the US Treasury:

(click for larger map)

As the US Treasury does not release the full list of foreign debt for all countries, a few adjustments were necessary to produce this map. All countries holding less than $12.3 billion were merged into one ‘All Other’ category. As this does not tell where the debt is, this single figure ($202.5 billion, less than 4.5% of the total foreign debt in total) has been applied to the area of Antarctica in this map. This allows to see the total distribution of all debt, including that which can not be further distributed over the missing countries. As it is so low (and each country itself would have less than the largest country included in the data, i.e. Australia with $12.3 billion), it would have little impact on the overall appearance of the map.
Furthermore, the US Treasury publishes the a single figure for all Oil Exporting nations (Ecuador, Venezuela, Indonesia, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Gabon, Libya, and Nigeria) as well as the Caribbean Banking Centres (Bahamas, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Netherlands Antilles, Panama, and British Virgin Islands). Here again a compromise was necessary to include those countries in the cartogram. For both categories the respective countries were merged and treated as one homogeneous region in the map transformation. The distribution of US debt within those countries may therefore differ from the representation in the map, while the overall shape still gives a good indication of the distribution of debt, not least because the overall number for both areas does not dominate the overall distribution. Both regions are clearly marked in the map with the red respectively yellow outline and the crisscross / dotted pattern.
As some people prefer conventional maps to cartograms, there is also a more traditional view to these figures available from the people of Development Seed. Their map shows the US foreign debt as bubbles (for those countries where data is available as a single figure). The map can interactively be panned and zoomed, and it also shows further historic data when moving the mouse pointer over the bubbles:

And how did we get into this mess? In 2006 filmmaker Danny Schechter released his film In Debt we Trust, not only a telling name, but almost a prophecy of the things to come in the years after. As stated in the editorial review, the documentary is the story of 21st-century serfdom and shows how the new American way of life has shaped over the years into what we witness now as a continuation of the financial crisis. “The whole world depends on the economic stability of the United States. Yet, as its national and consumer debt escalates, our interconnected global economy is at incredible risk. IN DEBT WE TRUST, as timely and relevant as a film can be, delivers an urgent warning that can’t be ignored.“. For those who don’t want to get into debt for watching the film, it also is available online:

The map on this page has been created by Benjamin D. Hennig and is property of the Sasi Research Group (University of Sheffield). We welcome the use of our maps under the Creative Commons conditions; please contact us for further details – we also appreciate a notification if you used our maps somewhere else. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

Maps for the 21st Century

worldmapper — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 05:00:23 +0000

499 years after Mercator’s birth we may feel that the age of discovery is long gone. We seem to have explored almost every patch of our planet, considerably supported by Mercator’s famous world map that allowed sailors for the first time to reliably navigate across the world’s oceans. His innovation was a significant contribution to the early days of globalisation. Globalisation has turned our planet into a human planet, where people have become a substantial component of the processes that influence our livelihoods – some go as far as calling this a new geological era, the anthropocene. But while we have maps and images of every spot of the earth, we do not fully understand the human environments and interrelations to the natural environment. Normal maps show where sheep and other lovely creatures of nature live but hide much of the so important populous spaces of humanity.
The maps that I created as part of my PhD research are based on a novel cartogram mapping technique, deploying Gastner/Newman’s diffusion-based cartogram algorithm in a new way. The maps give every person living on this planet the same amount of space, while reducing the least populated places to a minimum. The map projection is calculated from an equally distributed population grid so that, unlike in other cartograms, the transformed grid cells preserve an accurate geographical reference. This allows us to map a diverse range of geographical layers on top of the population projection. The new maps show the social and physical environment in relation to population and provide a fresh perspective on the complex geography of the 21st century world. The following animation shows a series of maps that demonstrate the visual capabilities of the technique (the video can be switched to HD resolution by clicking the 360p note in the bottom panel):

Just as Mercator’s world map was a very helpful tool in an era of discovery, the new gridded world population cartogram is a helpful basemap to look at the world from the view of people. By looking at the geography of the planet on a population cartogram we can better see and understand where people live in relation to nature, and which patterns shape the globalised world. We start to realise that there are people far less connected to the global flows of money, goods, or air traffic in this so-called interconnected world. We see where many people have to live without lights at night, where few people make lots of money, and where many people have so much less. We can start to understand where most people are at risk of earthquakes and of rising sea levels. This can all be seen by slightly changing the view and putting people into the focus of the map projection. Mercator’s world map may not have become redundant, but it is about time that we show the human planet in novel ways to better understand the space that matters most to us: the human space.
Like other map projections, these maps have a distinct geography with a very high accuracy that can be traced back to its origins in the physical space. The following animation shows, how a ‘normal’ map projection transforms into a gridded world population cartogram (the video can be switched to HD resolution by clicking the 360p note in the bottom panel):

The new online world population atlas developed from this technique transfers the mapping concept to a larger scale, showing population cartograms for every country of the world. Equivalent to the gridded world population cartogram, this is the human shape of the countries. The maps show where people live and how the population is distributed within their countries. These maps must not be confused with being only maps of the cities in the world, but they show the rural populations alike. Even if we live in an increasingly urbanised world, where more than half of the world’s population now lives in cities, there are still many countries with significant rural populations (such as Cambodia or Kenya, which both have around 80% of people living in the countryside). These large rural populations are shown just as well in these maps as the urban populations of the highly urbanised countries (such as Belgium or Argentina, where more than 90% of the people live in cities).

The original content of this page has been part of a contribution for the Maney Publishing Feature Maps for the 21st Century. All maps and animations have been created by Benjamin D. Hennig and are property of the Sasi Research Group (University of Sheffield). We welcome the use of our maps under the Creative Commons conditions; please contact us for further details – we also appreciate a notification if you used our maps somewhere else. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.