Cartographical Constructs

For review purposes, use this link to go to the Bridging World History website. From that page, at the lower left-hand corner, you will find the link to the video. It may take more than one attempt to get the video up and running--the website seems not to be running at optimal capacity.

I. The Mercator Map Projection

According to geographer Alberto Rios at Arizona State University:

In the Mercator projection (c. 1569), Greenland, which has 0.8 million square miles, is shown as being equal to Africa, which has 11.6 million square miles. A good discussion of this can be found at the Diversophy site, including the following execerpt: "The Mercator projection creates increasing distortions of size as you move away from the equator. As you get closer to the poles the distortion becomes severe. Cartographers refer to the inability to compare size on a Mercator projection as "the Greenland Problem." Greenland appears to be the same size as Africa, yet Africa's land mass is actually fourteen times larger (see figure below right). Because the Mercator distorts size so much at the poles it is common to crop Antarctica off the map. This practice results in the Northern Hemisphere appearing much larger than it really is. Typically, the cropping technique results in a map showing the equator about 60% of the way down the map, diminishing the size and importance of the developing countries. This was convenient, psychologically and practically, through the eras of colonial domination when most of the world powers were European. It suited them to maintain an image of the world with Europe at the center and looking much larger than it really was. Was this conscious or deliberate? Probably not, as most map users probably never realized the Eurocentric bias inherent in their world view. When there are so many other projections to chose from, why is it that today the Mercator projection is still such a widely recognized image used to represent the globe? The answer may be simply convention or habit. The inertia of habit is a powerful force. A different type of projection is an "Equal-Area" projection. This shows sizes in proportion while sacrificing true shape. The Peters Projection is one type of equal area map. Is it the only one? No, there are hundreds of others, but only a handful of others are in common use. The Mollweide projection, developed in 1805, is commonly used for displaying distributions (people, telecommunications equipment, the world's religions, etc). Karl B. Mollweide (1774-1825) specifically sought to improve upon the weaknesses of the Mercator projection. The Eckert IV is another equal area projection developed in the 1920's by Max Eckert (1868-1938). This has the advantage of less shape distortion near the equator and the poles. A fourth equal-area map is Goode's Homolosine created in 1921 by J. Paul Goode (1862-1932). This interrupted map looks like an orange peel and has less shape distortion than the other equal area maps" Maps, like other historical artifacts and sources, should be used critically. Mercator intended his map to be used for sea navigation--and in that use, it is till without peer, really (which isn't to bad for a map drawn almost 500 years ago. The problems with the Mercator map is that it was not only used for navigation, but informed many people's knowledge of the world. When you think the continent of Africa is only the size of Greenland, you are more likely to minimize the problems that pop up occasionally there--and to dismiss them as unimportant. II. Maps and Bias Like other historical documents, maps usually reflect the biases of their makers. As we can see from the ancient map of Korea: maps often reflect the world view of its maker--or, at least, the view of the world that its creator wanted it to be. While these maps would not be valuable for getting from one country to another--or even around the corner to the country grocery--they are valuable to historians, because they tell us a lot about the worldview of those powerful enough and rich enough to commission a map maker to make a map for them. III. Conclusion History is the study of the human past. Historians, in order to study the past, have to use documents created by humans. These documents and artifacts are not perfect sources, and most have some kind of bias built in to them. Historians approach the study of history with some of their own biases, which they try to control for by making very broad document search; but, in the end, what a historian finds important or unimportant is in part reliant upon her world view--which is, again in part, shaped by the biases she brings to the study of history. History, therefore, is necessarily shaped by not only events of the past, but how those events are interpreted in the present.