Space
Readings
It looks like this is a lot of reading, but lots of these are short videos or tweets or interactive websites, so don’t worry!
- Why all world maps are wrong
- The True Size Of…
- Projection comparison
- Map projections (try comparing Robinson with Mercator to see how badly Mercator exaggerates the northern hemisphere)
- Gall-Peters Projection
- “When Maps Lie”
- Animated Mercator distortion
- “These Twisted Maps Prove That America Isn’t a Red Country”
- “The next great fake news threat? Bot-designed maps”
- “New World Map That Accurately Shows Earth in 2D Created by Scientists”
Questions to reflect on
(Remember, you don’t need to answer all of these—or even any of them! These are just here to help guide your thinking.)
- How can you know if a map projection is truthful or misleading?
- What’s wrong (or not wrong) with using points on maps? Choropleths? Lines?
Other resources
Check out this post where someone used ggplot2 and sf to create fancy city map-based art that she printed for a friend. You can do similar things after this session!
In addition to the example for this session, you can check out this tutorial on using the sf package to create maps. It shows how to include fancy map stuff like a north arrow and scale bar.
Slides
The slides for today’s lesson are available online as an HTML file. Use the buttons below to open the slides either as an interactive website or as a static PDF (for printing or storing for later). You can also click in the slides below and navigate through them with your left and right arrow keys.
View all slides in new window Download PDF of all slides
Fun fact: If you type ? (or shift + /) while going through the slides, you can see a list of special slide-specific commands.
Videos
Videos for each section of the lecture are available at this YouTube playlist.
You can also watch the playlist (and skip around to different sections) here:
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Alberto Cairo, The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication (Berkeley, California: New Riders, 2016). ↩︎
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Kieran Healy, Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), http://socviz.co/. ↩︎