Today maps are used for everything : from printing on them population surveys to the weather, through the navigation system to drive and even virtual layers of nearby businesses to guide us.We do not know how to live without maps.
The maps help us understand the world we live in , and they are often the only way to find the cause of something that seems to come out of nowhere, like an epidemic.With modern tools It is easy to manage maps, but the first investigations on paper maps were not so lucky.
The crank of the Broad Street well
The first of these maps took place in the London of 1854.Far from being the earthly paradise of the Industrial Revolution that today remind us of textbooks, the truth is that London was a ponzonoso place covered by the smoke of the factories and with a sewage system so deficient that Tamesis was sometimes buried by the casqueria of the markets in the area.
It was not a pleasant place, and surely the outbreak of cholera that began to slaughter the population did not help much to promote tourism.From one day to another, hundreds of Londoners got sick and began to die, and the doctors of the area attributed the disease and death to the miasma disease (insane vapors) and to the lack of the mentioned sewage system.
It is clear that the pestilence of the city did not help, but the local solution was not very helpful either: a treatment based on flowers to mask the smell .As a result, people continued to die, but The doctor John Snow had a different theory.He decided to draw with a dot on a map the deaths attributed to that "miasma" (about 600 at the end), as well as the wells with crosses:
Snow realized that the deaths were all located around Broad Street (today Broadwick St).Specifically next to the central well, something that his colleagues called a mere chance.They fought until the end against the hypothesis of Snow who, tired of being denied, ended up going to the well one day and pulling the lever.
Unintentionally, John Snow conducted the first epidemiological study of map-based history , saving an entire neighborhood from probable death and London from a cholera epidemic.Thanks to Snow's analysis, London invested in a substantial improvement of its sewerage, improving the lives of millions of people, and all using a map.
What else are the maps for?
The maps are of crucial importance in our life without the need to save thousands of people from the disease (which too).Thanks to the maps and the information we reflect on them we are able to discover aspects of the world that we had not even considered, that we did not know too well or that we attributed to other causes.
One of the many anecdotal examples that exist in relation to maps is the way in which traffic jams were discovered.When analysts began studying them decades ago, they attributed the main cause to road junctions such as straits or accidents But this did not match what was observed on completely straight roads at times of not too much traffic.Thanks to this we understood that an obstacle is not necessary for a traffic jam to form, just as I reconstruct the Sugiyama experiment:
#Whymaps, reality explained on maps
#Whymaps, written with the numeral (#), is a project that tries to explain the complexity of the world and our political or economic reality using maps.« Maps to shed some light on issues complex », according to its promoters.
For example, the hot war in Syria is explained in an affordable way with this 10-minute video that explains the most important political movements since the beginning of civilization, if you still don't understand the problem of the refugees, click on the video:
Another project of the same company for the circular economy proposes, using maps to visualize the environmental damage and the management of materials, a new production model, as well as a new type of business that we must consider in the future.
Emapic, participatory maps to investigate
Participatory systems are booming, and the maps could not be less in this avalanche.For some time emapic tries to explain knowledge, opinions and feelings of citizens around the world using maps .It allows us to create our own survey to spread it around the world and analyze what each citizen thinks based on the area they inhabit about an idea or proposal.
There are many with low participation, but others, such as the map "where there is a Galician" (above) give us quite peculiar results.
Some maps that you have not even considered
Perhaps the maps that attract the most attention are those that were found by chance or that yielded unplanned results.Like the map of the rubber ducks that helped to map surface currents :
In 1992, a freighter departed from Hong Kong with about 29,000 plastic toys, many of them yellow rubber ducklings, which with the sinking of the ship dispersed into the sea, a catastrophe that the Curtis oceanographer Charles Ebbesmeyer used to map currents depending on where the ducklings were appearing over the years.
The map we see above has nothing to do with light pollution (that's the one below), but with the overlapping of all earthquakes with more than four on the Richter scale since 1898.It gives us an idea, for example, of the instability of the real estate market.While the one mentioned on electricity gives us a very different perspective:
Below, the countries where people feel most loved.Perhaps the reason why tourists put Spaniards at the head of Spain's advantages (right in front of food).
The map below explains, among others, the difficulties of certain parts of the world when they try to work together.It's not that they don't share language, it's that they don't share or spell! As if to understand each other...
But not all maps are of the Earth or its plots.As usual as we are looking at the navel, we rarely recognize an object that has been accompanying us since the beginning of humanity:
If you were wondering at the beginning of the article, what you see above is the Moon, quadrant I-713 or Tycho.Although from below we find a continuous gray-white, in this NASA map it appears colored according to of the components: a curious map in the present and of great relevance for the future.
Images | Colera on Broad, NordNordWest, Earthquakes, Igor Markov, Max Fisher/Washington Post, 2013, Schriftsysteme der Welt, Tycho Quadrant
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