Finding Home with a Homemade Map

We’re going to start this week out with some good news and for that we turn to China. 30 years ago, child traffickers kidnapped four-year old Li Jingwei from his family and sold him to another family over 1,000 miles away. A BBC article from earlier this month covered Li Jingwei’s reunion with his family. How did it happen? Because of a map he drew and shared with the internet.

Here’s a screenshot of that map.

It’s missing a Starbucks though

We all create mental maps of our surroundings. And not surprisingly they grow larger as we get older. But this man’s ability to recall details of his family hometown allowed internet sleuths, and eventually the police, to identify the village. DNA tests then connected Li to a woman whose son had been abducted.

When we draw out these maps ourselves they become a link to the cartographic world. And that this man was able to use his own mental map to find his home. Well, like I said, we’re going to start the news off with some good news.

Credit for the piece goes to Li Jingwei.

Get Your Shots

I’ve heard a lot about vaccine hesitancy and resistance lately and I mentioned this on Monday. Subsequently, I thought I would try to make a graphic to try and help people understand where some of these excuses fit on the spectrum of rational to irrational—with claims of people being magnetised off the chart in the land of kooky.

But I also realised there’s a second spectrum, albeit far more limited in range, of selfishness vs altruism. And there is an interesting shift in how those who waited for the most vulnerable to receive their shots first were, initially, altruistic and rational. But now that those populations have received their vaccines, it’s shifted into an irrational selfish behaviour.

Anyway, I made a few sketches and as I was working on it, there was something in the aesthetic quality of the sketches that I couldn’t quite replicate digitally. And so I present the unpolished rough cut of my graphic.

Just get your shots, people.

For the fuller explanations, I refer you to my aforementioned post earlier this week. This was just an attempt to visualise the two spectrums.

Credit for the piece is mine.

Drawing the World

The inability of people to understand geography beyond their own borders is not new. But today’s post uses that to create a new map—albeit from a limited sample. The creator of this map merged 30 different, hand-drawn maps into one to reveal the world as imagined by his sample.

Composite map
Composite map

Credit for the piece goes to Zak Ziebell.

Circle Charts ca. 1937

Another image from my 1930s algebra book is on pie charts, or what was then called circle charts. And while the utility of such a chart form has not changed, especially in these examples, the circle chart of the 1930s had one particular good use for students. Constructing it.

Circle chart construction
Circle chart construction

Today a student plugs in numbers into a spreadsheet in Google Docs, Excel, or Open Office. He or she presses a button and the circle chart is done. Back in the 1930s, students needed to convert absolutes to percentages and then use protractors to draw the slices on pieces of paper. Fancy that, students having to do math to make a chart.

(Insert 1/1000 Airplane Jokes Here)

Airlines merge. (As do many other companies, but those companies are not the focus of this post.) And often the mergers are complex. Lamentably, one cannot simply merge logos and be done. Here is looking at you, UAL Corporation (United Air Lines) + Continental Airlines Inc.= United Continental Holdings Co.—not that I particularly care for the United Continental logo mashup, I miss the Saul Bass logo for United.

Unfortunately there are things to worry about like getting planes to fly, not crash into each other, not to mention ticketing, unions, general technology…one hopefully gets the idea.

But for those of you who do not, an article in the New York Times about the merger of Delta and Northwest includes a graphic about the master guide to the whole process. Note the use of sticky pad paper. Each piece represents one project, with projects containing as many as a thousand separate tasks.

Merger Process Wall
Merger Process Wall

RMS Titanic, 99 Years Ago

99 years ago today, the RMS Titanic sank in the North Atlantic with more than 2/3 of the over 2200 passengers losing their lives. The ship was rather state-of-the-art and was considered remarkably safe with more lifeboats than was legally required for the passengers and crew. She also had a number of watertight bulkheads that could contain flooding and keep the ship afloat even if a remarkable total of four such compartments were flooded.

TItanic Cut Away Where the Berg Hit
TItanic Cut Away Where the Berg Hit

But as we all know, the iceberg, frigid water, and brittle steel combined to flood not four, but six compartments. And while more than legally sufficient, the number of lifeboats and passenger space was insufficient to save all the passengers. This illustration, by G.F. Morrell details how floating catamaran deck rafts could have saved lives.

Proposed Change to Ship Design
Proposed Change to Ship Design

All photos from Life.

Maps Made by Hand (Or Simulations Thereof)

Le Monde is a French-language publication and so I never really bother with it, despite favourable reviews. However, they do have a small site with some content in the English language that I check from time to time. Frequently they have maps or other graphics of some interest, and this time upon visiting—done to see if they have anything on Libya given the lead taken by France and the UK—they had a few maps of the situation in North Africa.

Political Situation in North Africa and the Middle East
Political Situation in North Africa and the Middle East

By and large, nothing radical or ground-breaking in the maps. But, the designer, Philippe Rekacewicz, used a different cartographic perspective than I am at least accustomed to seeing for infographics. And then the aesthetic of the map is interesting, and quite different than what one typically sees. In a refreshingly interesting way. Now, whether he used a texture or filter in Photoshop to create the background map or whether he physically drew the map (and then overlaid the informational elements digitally), it matters little as the style works. I enjoy the idea of mixing the hand-made and data visualisation—though it needs to be well-executed.

He created a few sets of maps; each makes use of a slightly different palette. These certainly help create the visual distinction necessary between data sets. The pie charts are not particularly helpful, but they at least are kept simple: looking at only two parts of the whole. The comparison within each nation by bar charts of internet connectivity and higher-education learning works. It begins to work not so well as one tries to compare country to country. Though, the separation of the bars into ten-percentage point sub-bars begins to alleviate that issue. The main map, that highlights the political situation does a nice job of putting these countries into broader context. That is, who has oil and who has control over the key waterways in the region.

the three smaller maps
the three smaller maps

All in all, a refreshing set of maps that illustrate the fluid situation in North Africa and the Middle East.