Today our topic is one of my favorites: Maps! Ordinarily we’d actually spend two weeks on this topic, so you’re getting the Reader’s Digest Condensed Version today. (Also, if more than one or two of you gets this reference, I’ll be shocked.) If maps interest you, or they interest you more after reading this blog post, you should take another class with me. I love maps and we talk a lot about maps in all my classes.

Just like with visualizations, these days maps are everywhere. And, just like with visualizations, we’re trained to see maps as being inherently truthful. We think of them as being factual representations of reality. But, again, that’s just not true. Maps are as fallible as any other type of visualization–and in fact, that’s what they are: just a specialized type of visualization. So all the rules we already talked about with reading visualizations still apply.

Just to review, those are “Data, argument, structure, and distractions.” We’re not going to go over all of those again. But I do want to talk about just one form of misdirection that maps are exceptionally good at: representing people as land. 

Maps can mislead just like any other visualization.

At the risk of getting political, one of the best–or worst–examples of this phenomenon occurred in 2019 when Congress was conducting the impeachment of President Trump. Several officials tweeted out a map that got a huge response from Trump supporters. It was a map of the United States, colored with blue and red, as you’d expect, and the caption was “Impeach this.” This map was, of course, based on the 2016 electoral results. The country was almost entirely red. The argument Trump’s supporters implied was that the red area was so much vaster than the blue area that it would be impossible to get support for impeachment. Aside from the fact that partisan affiliation ought not necessarily map onto support for impeachment, there’s a big problem with that map. The problem is that much of the population of the United States lives in the small blue areas on the map. So the landform of North Dakota or Montana might be red, but the people in New York or LA are blue. 

So this map has misled us by giving us the wrong scale. The scale shouldn’t be the land. It should be the people. 

Here’s a GIF that illustrates how one cartographer solved the problem of counting land instead of people regarding this map. In your group, discuss what he did. How is the map different now, both in look and in argument? (By the way, the map he created is called a “cartogram” because he’s not exactly mapping the space.)

Ironically, the solution to this map’s problem can create problems for other maps. Sometimes we take the absolute aspects of our numbers at face value, without considering other factors like how the space actually works. Note the XKCD comic here. It’s pointing out a common problem: making claims about how people behave that’s actually just about how many people are present. In maps that make these sorts of claims, we very rarely need to know the absolute numbers (voting numbers aside). Instead, what we want to know is percentage. 

XKCD comic about heat maps. 

The maps in the XKCD comic are often called “Heat Maps.” But heat maps that account for absolute numbers end up just mapping the population density. What we actually want to know is what percentage of the population fits into these categories, or some other relative metric. If 10 out of 100,000 subscribe to Martha Stewart, it’s maybe not that that remarkable. But if 10 out of 100 do, that’s a much bigger percentage. Maps that rely on absolute numbers can be misleading. So always check the scale and methods, just like for any other visualization.

What can maps do for me?

Why should we care about space? In one sense, it’s obvious: we live and move in a spatial world. Looking at space can help us to understand the scale of things in a way that mere words may not be able to convey.

But…get ready to be shocked…space isn’t the same for everyone! We all conceive of space in different ways. Just like with time, there are some “standard” units of space that are commonly used, but not everyone agrees on them or on their value. Go search in the search engine of your choice for “Mars Climate Orbiter” to find out what happened when two different groups of people used different units of measurement.

Not only do we use different ways to measure space than others, we also sometimes draw space differently. It’s all mostly academic if you’re just drawing a map out of general interest. But if you’re drawing a map that’s meant to get someone from point A to point B, like a ship’s navigational chart, you probably want the map and the actual earth to be somewhat similar. This has been a problem since the first days of mapmaking: how do you represent a 3-dimensional object (the earth) in 2 dimensions (a flat piece of paper)?

Well, I could answer this question for you, but I think I’m going to let the West Wing take this one. Check out the YouTube video I’ve linked below. 

OK, now you’ve watched one of my favorite clips of all time. It brings to the fore how even our conceptions and drawings of space are constructed. There’s no one true way to draw the earth in 2 dimensions, but the way you choose indicates what you’re prioritizing, and those priorities can have real-world consequences.

The clip from the West Wing isn’t wrong that we often think of political boundaries as being more important if they’re bigger. So the fact that the Mercator projection artificially inflates the size of landforms farther away from the equator does make a difference in how we perceive those landforms. But ever since the Mercator projection was created, we’ve used it for a lot of different things. The reason: because in the Mercator projection, lines of latitude and longitude are perpendicular to each other. This means it’s easy to navigate on a straight line from point A to point B. Under ordinary circumstances, you probably would have used the Mercator projection a lot this week–it’s the basis for most web maps, including things like Google and Apple Maps (though Google recently switched to another projection very similar to Mercator).

If you think this projection thing is crazy, try out for yourself how the Mercator projection distorts relative size here.

Unusual maps are cool.

But these “formal” maps are only one way of thinking about space. I want us to think about more informal ways of mapping. People often draw maps of their surroundings, particularly when they’re doing something they think is significant. We know about battles in the antebellum period partially because people who were in or around those battles drew maps of them. These are very valuable sources because they tell us what was important to the people who drew them.

So here’s what I want you to do: draw a map of your surroundings (this is your response). What does the space of your surroundings look like. Don’t go for meticulous accuracy–draw the map that shows how you relate to your space. 

Here’s an additional challenge. If it’s too boring to draw a map of what you can see, draw a map of how your other senses engage with your surroundings. What do different parts of your house smell like? Sound like? Feel like? I’ve included here an example of a smell map that is really interesting. Once you’ve drawn it, think about how your perspective on the space changes when you think about your other senses. What story does your map tell? Write a blog post that shows the map you drew, as well as your thoughts about it.

“Smellscape: Smells of Auld Reekie on a very breezy day in 2011.” Katie McLean.

Space can also help us tell stories about history. It can open up new ways of thinking about what happened. Here are a couple of examples that you can look at of how I’ve used space to think in different ways about my own work, both for the Quasi-War and the First Barbary War. 

So for Creative Project 2, you’re going to be making a narrative map–a map that uses space to tell a story. In some ways, it’s an awful lot like the timeline you might have made last week–you’re combining time and space into one thing. So think about the things we talked about with time as well as the considerations about space we’ve looked at here.