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Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

dominik-schwarz.net

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Re: Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

#191

Post by kibibu »

mewo2 wrote: post #34
dietrichepp wrote: post #7

This guy "loves world maps" but chose Mercator for the wall of his room? I guess there's no accounting for taste. There are hundreds of projections to choose from, why choose the one optimized for navigation by compass ?

I can't believe I'm doing this, but I think I'm going to defend Mercator here. The Mercator projection was indeed originally designed for compass navigation, but the reason it's still used for web mapping is slightly different. The Mercator projection is conformal . What this means is that angles (and hence in some sense shapes) are preserved locally. When we zoom in on a small section of the Mercator projection, we…

> as many small villages marked on the map as possible

Based on this image: http://www.dominik-schwarz.net/potpourri/worldmap/images/DSC... the entire continent of Africa looks only slightly larger than Greenland (when in fact it's about 14 times larger), and substantially smaller than Russia (when it is actually ~1.7 times larger).

Greenland has a population of ~60,000. Africa has a population of ~1.1billion.

I think Africa would have more small villages than Greenland (and Northern Russia) combined, yet is afforded less space.

Re: Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

#192

Post by haihaibye »

jannes wrote: post #114
haihaibye wrote: post #29

Not sure of the resolution but the easiest solution would be wallpaper. Googling "world map wallpaper" returns quite a lot of results, eg: http://st.houzz.com/simgs/31e1e6fa0fd87c96_4-7734/contempora...

The picture you linked is clearly a 3D rendering and not an actual photo.

Yes it is, it wasn't obvious on my phone...

Another one: https://www.walldecalcompany.com/product_images/x/995/world_...

Re: Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

#193

Post by liotier »

amscanne wrote: post #155
jamesfe wrote: post #102

I was formerly a cartographer with the military; I have lots of experience with large format maps, both of the world and of single countries (usually Iraq). It was fun to read an article about a map that wasn't hastily tacked up on a wall with nails or duct tape. A few notes: - Paper sags over time. Good thing he mounted it to a board - We printed on tyvek for water/rip proofing, which was interesting. It's surprisin…

Out of curiosity, what projection would you go with?

I like Kavrayskiy VII as a good compromise projection fit for a rectangular print - just cut out the South Pole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavrayskiy_VII_projection

Re: Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

#194

Post by DigitalSea »

Amazing. I have always been somewhat obsessed with maps since I was a kid. My light up and quite massive globe was one of my most prized possessions when other kids were more concerned with their Gameboy's and lego.

A full-scale wall map has always crossed my mind, not making one, but buying one. I did try and find one once and came up empty handed. I am probably in the minority here, but I like the Mercator projection and I think it looks great on a wall in that size (at least North is always up) even if it isn't exactly well-loved by that many.

Re: Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

#195

Post by function_seven »

bobbles wrote: post #185
kens wrote: post #82

I can't believe how negative the comments are here, criticizing the projection. I don't really like the term "middlebrow dismissal" but it seems to apply. As an aside, have you looked closely at Greenland on a globe? It looks all wrong - long and skinny like someone messed up the aspect ratio.

There's an unbelievable amount of pretentiousness in this thread, it's ridiculous.

Imagine the roar if he'd used Comic Sans as the typeface for all place names. And made the frame out of re-purposed shipping pallets.

Re: Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

#196

Post by quinndupont »

nemo1618 wrote: post #178
quinndupont wrote: post #85

This is so brilliantly reminiscent of Borges' famous fiction: On Exactitude in Science Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley. ...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographer…

So was that map the territory, or not?

Neither! Paradox or aporia is my guess. Gets you thinking though, which is clearly the idea.

Re: Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

#197

Post by liotier »

maxerickson wrote: post #148
natural219 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't follow that because CartoCSS/Mapbox studios is "editable", "customizable", and "easy", that the specific combinations of configuration and adjustment available would meet his complex criterion of minimizing time, effort, money, and aesthetics. I'd imagine Google Maps is optimized to a T for all of the tiny specific label placements you want, and I'm not convinced from the one-off choice it would have been…

There is indeed no great solution to 'prominence' in the OSM data. There have been efforts to add population information to places, and to promote so called villages into so called towns when they are locally important, but those efforts have not been completely systematic (so they might be better in Austria than Minnesota, and even worse in Wisconsin). Which is one reason to turn to the Natural Earth data, it has be…

> There is indeed no great solution to 'prominence' in the OSM data.

There has been lots of research about how to automatically produce Goldilocks Maps (enough information - but not too much) - I remember an article (whose URL I can't locate) which showed increased readability by pruning minor location names when they are too close to major locations. Google does that sort of thing well, but they are not the only ones nowadays - for example the osmfr Openstreetmap style does, in my opinion, a decent job of prioritizing labels: http://tile.openstreetmap.fr/

Re: Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

#198

Post by kremlin »

teh_klev wrote: post #147
skrause wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/977/

And obligatory West Wing "Gall Peters Projection" clip: "What the hell is that?" "It's where you've been living this whole time" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVX-PrBRtTY

That was extremely funny. Especially the bit about putting the north on the bottom. "But you can't do that."

Re: Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

#199

Post by brc »

jamesfe wrote: post #102

I was formerly a cartographer with the military; I have lots of experience with large format maps, both of the world and of single countries (usually Iraq). It was fun to read an article about a map that wasn't hastily tacked up on a wall with nails or duct tape. A few notes: - Paper sags over time. Good thing he mounted it to a board - We printed on tyvek for water/rip proofing, which was interesting. It's surprisin…

My father in law was a cartographer by trade, he got started when conscripted into the Vietnam war, and continued in mapping and cartography for his entire career. He spent his entire service producing detailed maps of Vietnam from a very long way away. All hand drawn. I've seen a couple of pieces of his work, it's awesomely detailed. They were shipping out new maps on a very frequent basis.

Re: Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

#200

Post by barbs »

This is really cool. Thanks for documenting and capturing the meticulous process of creating this, it was an enjoyable read. I'd love to see a really high definition photo that captures both the scale of the map and the amount of detail in it, preferably in a format that makes it easy to zoom around on different locations to see the detail. Not sure how feasible that would be though :).
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