The classes were spent getting started on your papers.
I am reading a book that I will bring into class this coming week: The Easten Origins of Western Civilisation, by John M. Hobson.
One of the more simple issues he takes up is the manner in which the world is presented in the Mercator maps and many other maps, where lands in the north are presented as larger and more central than those in the southern hemisphere.
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| Mercatur map |
Hobson notes that "the actual landmass
of the southern hemisphere is exactly twice that of the northern hemisphere.
And yet on the Mercator, the landmass of the North occupies two-thirds of the
map while the landmass of the South represents only a third. Thus while
Scandinavia is about a third the size of India, they are accorded the same
amount of space on the map. Moreover, on the Mercator, Greenland appears almost
twice the size of China even though the latter is almost four times the size of
the former.”
The Peters project map helps to present a more faithful representation of the world:
This debate was introduced to me many years ago via the TV show West Wing. This entertaining clip has the benefit of not only presenting basic land-mass arguments, it explain how maps can be connected to attitudes of superiority. In this scene, the fictional Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality try to explain the importance of maps in education:
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