How to Lie with Maps

When I was in school I took a lot of Geography courses. One of my textbooks was How to Lie with Maps by Mark Monmonier. A very interesting book. The basic concept is that it is impossible to represent a round surface on a flat one without distorting something. Remember how when you look at a map of the world and Greenland looks to be almost as big as the entire continental US? It isn’t really that big. Look at a globe and you can see the difference.

The reason this happens is because in order to make most of the continents look like they actually look, map makers stretch out the land masses in the polar regions. The only area on the map (to the left) where scale and distance is exactly correct is at the equator. The further North or South you go the more distorted everything gets. This is just one way that they can distort maps.

For most people this doesn’t matter. Most people live in the regions that look mostly correct. I bet it you meet someone from Greenland and you ask them how they feel about their county being grossly misrepresented on maps, they will have something to say about it.

This even happens on smaller scale maps. A map of Montana for instance. The following two maps were distorted differently with the math used to create them. One tries to preserve the curved perspective of the latitudinal lines as seen on the actual curved Earth. The other map ignores this so that it can show the East/West lines as straight.

Now you ask how is this lying? Well, it is distorting the representation of the Earth because it has to. Think about it a different way though. All maps have a purpose: road maps, naval navagational maps, topographical maps, political leanings, climatic maps, weather maps, underground cave maps, etc. If you are looking at a road map for the state of Montana, are the roads actually as big as the lines drawn on the map? Of course not! Are the towns only as big as the dots used to represent them? Do the forests of parks begin and end exactly where the lines make them? When a river runs right next to a road they might move it a bit on the map so that it can easily be seen and differentiated. The maker of the map has to choose what is important and what isn’t or else a map would get way to cluttered with information to be of any use.

These two maps use slighty different data but they do show two very different ways of looking at the US political trends. Area vs. Electoral Votes. One map looks fairly even and the other leans towards the blue.

Here is an interesting article from the BBC about maps.

A good map delivers concise information in a very clear way for a specific purpose. That purpose is decided by the creator of the map.


2 Responses to “How to Lie with Maps”

  1. Regarding the Electoral Votes map . . .








  2. […] context to this post see the “How to Lie with Maps” post. One of these maps is most interested in representing geographical area and the other […]

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