We Don’t Know Jack About the World – Alisa Miller TED Talk
Alisa Miller, President and CEO of Public Radio International, enlightens us on how little U.S. news coverage there is on the rest of the world. How does she do this? She uses maps of course. Miller uses visualization to tell a (short) story. She shows us all the coverage on Iraq and the lack of coverage on all other countries, which is practically nothing.
The name of this type of morphed map escapes me right now. Maybe someone can remind me?
[Thanks, Jodi]
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Nice one!
The maps look like the ones on worldmapper
Concerning the naming:
At their about page, they are refered to as density-equalising maps with the following paper reference:
Michael T. Gastner and M. E. J. Newman (2004) Diffusion-based method for producing density equalizing maps Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 101, 7499-7504.
It’s called a Cartogram. While it works well to show a few (overwhelming) data points like here, it’s unfortunately used for a lot of data where it really doesn’t tell you much.
That is fantastic! I’d love to know how she generated that…what a useful tool.
I should’ve clicked before I typed: Cart and Mapresso seem to fit the bill nicely.
This makes quite a nice comparison with the inaccuracies of the standard mercator projection used in most schools. This shows the size of north America grossly out of proportion with it’s real size, much as the news coverage does.
@Everyone – ah, right. cartogram. i knew someone would know. thanks, all.
@Liam – I’ve heard that a lot about the mercator projection. what other projections do you recommend? unfortunately, no one’s answered this question for me yet :(
The following web page shows a number of different projections. From 1988 to 1998, National Geographic used the Robinson Projection, but for the past decade they’ve used the Winkel Tripel Projection.
http://www.diversophy.com/petersmap.htm
That’s a great way to express the amount of coverage.