Weekly Blog Post #9

Tuesday, October 8th, 2013

Afterthoughts on Maps and Bias

Recently, cartography has been chasing me everywhere. I read an article that made me ponder about maps. The writer asked "Why do maps look the way they do?". He pointed out that, technically speaking, the landmasses did not have to be set out the way they were. Africa could have been situated at the top of the map, and Europe underneath, because Earth is, after all, an ellipse that does not have defined top and bottom. This comment made me realize how weird it was for me to picture a map of that sort, a "reversed" map, and it reminded me of the surprise I had felt when I had seen the upside-down map of the world. I was so used to seeing the world depicted the way I am used to, with the countries on top on top and the ones underneath underneath, that my mind had accepted and ingrained this as a truth of some sort. It had captured that map as the real image of the world, and somewhat rejected images that contradicted this idea.

How do maps shape our thinking? Most of the times, top is associated with superior and better, and bottom with inferior. Is that categorization applied as we view the map of the world as well? It made me think that there was a possibility that maps do indeed reinforce the stereotypes we have, and that they may not be as unbiased as I had thought they would be. Well, no, let me clarify. I knew that maps have distortions, depending on the aspect the cartographers decide to be most faithful to. But I hadn't thought about how maps might affect the preconceptions we may have on different countries, different areas of the world.