Map mania

Cartography is not a lost art, but one of lost artists-or at least anonymous ones.

Wikipedia names more than 200 mapmakers spanning 25 centuries in its “List of Cartographers,” but only a couple of names are familiar (Ptolemy, Leonardo da Vinci).

The most famous cartographers’ identities-ancient or modern-are relegated to obscurity. It’s possible a few readers may be familiar with Fra Mauro or Gerardus Mercator (after all, 13,031 people had viewed the top cartographers list on Ranker.com), especially since Mercator’s world map was included in an article called “3 Controversial Maps” widely shared on social media and forwarded in emails.

The controversy around the Mercator world map was that it distorted continents. Greenland is depicted as about the same size as Africa on the map, though Africa’s surface area is actually 14 times larger.

Some saw racism in the distortions, not surprisingly. But since it was developed in 1569 by a European for European navigation, it’s really no surprise that Europe is portrayed over sized, or that its cylindrical format created random distortions near the top, since the idea was for navigators to lay it flat and draw lines for their courses on it.

World maps have undergone recent revisions, and the most accurate now are generally considered to be the Robinson Projection or Winkel Tripel Projection.

The ironic footnote is the Mercator map is still the primary projection for Google Maps.

Contemporary maps no longer denote only, or even mainly, geography; they are composed with the inclusion of data to tell a larger story or paint a more meaningful picture.

Another of the “3 Controversial Maps” is the Proposed 38-State Map of the U.S., in which California geography professor George Etzel Pearcy wryly redrew the state borders in 1973.

Pearcy observed that original state boundaries were based primarily on geographical markers like rivers, as well as now-obsolete population characteristics, and had created several border-straddling cities like Kansas City, which created political and taxation challenges.

His map grouped cities more logically, and equalized state areas and populations. Because his redrawn boundaries made the states unrecognizable, he renamed them (the new state made up of Arkansas-plus parts of four existing neighbors-he called “Ozark”).

It’s really not a bad idea, but a totally impractical one, and his map was DOA when he approached Washington with it 40 years ago.

Another recent email forward that caught my eye was called “Maps, Understand Your World” and it included 25 maps using color-coding and other techniques to convey amazing or trivial (sometimes both) information about a number of topics.

One U.S. map showed the title of the highest-paid public employee in each state in place of the state name. In 40 states (yes, Arkansas among them), that person is a coach.

Another map displays a triangle connecting UCLA, USC and Stanford Research Institute (SRI), with a fourth line extending from SRI to Utah. That was the total of the world’s Internet connections in 1969.

The world maps range from surprising to silly. One shows countries, depicted in white on the map, that England has never invaded. There are only 22 such nations.

Another shows the world’s countries color-coded to depict metric system usage. Only three nations (the U.S. is by far the largest) are flagged in red as diehards against decimals.

Want to know where Google street view is available? There’s a world map for that.

Ever wonder which countries have the most skyscrapers? Four countries on a special map top the list (U.S., China, United Arab Emirates and Japan), and about half the world’s nations have none.

Other maps showed driving orientation by country, countries that had ever been Communist, nations that have ever operated an aircraft carrier, landlocked countries, and a worldwide breakdown of countries with McDonald’s restaurants.

Digital record-keeping is a natural for a whole new series of U.S. maps that show various data category breakdowns by county.

One of the most popular is the national election map, which shows a county-by-county breakdown of presidential votes. It’s a more accurate and representative view than simplistically identifying an entire state as red or blue-although some states are still pretty one-colored (Obama got skunked in Oklahoma, for example).

The fascinating thing is, for almost whatever an inquiring mind might want to know, some cartographer has created a map to demonstrate it.

It’s easy to see a U.S. county map defined by nearly all imaginable topics for which records are kept: population density, poverty, obesity, home ownership, crime, disease-you name it.

Simply Google “U.S. county map” plus your topic, and search under “Images.”

Not all maps are amusing. In a collection called “40 more maps that explain the world,” No. 37 somberly displays Japan’s firebombed cities during World War II, which killed several times as many Japanese as the atomic bomb attacks.

Each city location includes a destruction percentage, and a comparable American city for reference. Only one Arkansas city is used in the comparison: Little Rock with Hitachi, which was 72 percent destroyed.

It’s probably time to update an old saying. Today a map is worth a thousand words, and often much more.

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Dana Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.

Editorial, Pages 17 on 02/28/2014

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