NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Do Cartograms Make You Cringe?
From: David Pike
Date: 2017 Oct 25, 00:53 -0700
From: David Pike
Date: 2017 Oct 25, 00:53 -0700
I thought I’d seen it all when I was introduced to the charts produced for the early Decca XY plotters, which were limited to plotting hyperbolic Decca coordinates directly into XY directions, but yesterday I saw something to beat that. I picked up a free copy of the Royal Geographical Society’s house magazine for something to read on the train. In it was an article about Gender Equality across the World, which used graphics known as cartograms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartogram to display the information. I’m afraid that for me their unnaturalness destroys any understanding of the point they’re trying to make. Am I just a dinosaur who’s seen too many ‘real’ maps, or are others similarly affected? DaveP
