Maps

Lisa Bu, in her TED talk (about six minutes, worth your time) says, among other things, that maps have the cartographer's point of view as an implicit part of the message.

She is originally from China, and was surprised the first time she saw a map with the United States as the center of the world. She was used to China occupying that position.

Maps have a lot to say in addition to street names and locations, state and country boundaries, and so on. They say as much by what they de-emphasize or leave out altogether as they do by what they give prominence.

One map that comes to mind as I write is actually a series of maps in a book I saw years ago called "The State of the World Atlas". For a given subject (wealth, birth rate, size of the armed forces, and so on) the size of the countries was altered to reflect each one's ranking. Interesting.

The clearest example that comes to mind of a map carrying the cartographer's point of view is the Dymaxion map. Bucky Fuller created a map with the North Pole at the center and the shape of an icosahedron unfolded and laid flat. The results are striking. No country occupies center stage, the distortion of land mass size and relative location has all but disappeared, and it is clear that, contrary to what most of us were taught in school, there is only one ocean.

One ocean, one world. Spaceship Earth.

Thanks, Bucky.