Bad Maps
March 15, 2015 2:05 PM Subscribe
Maps can illuminate our world; they can enlighten us and make us see things differently; they can show how demographics, history, or countless other factors interact with human and physical geography. But, sometimes, maps can be utter disasters, either because they're wrong or simply very dumb. Here are a collection of maps so hilariously bad that you may never trust the form again.
More bad maps:
Cartastrophe
Misguided Maps
And: In Defense of Bad Maps
More bad maps:
Cartastrophe
Misguided Maps
And: In Defense of Bad Maps
These are all terrible, except the US ones. Why are randos from other countries not knowing our states important? I certainly don't know all of Germany's Bundesländer.
My favourites have to be where they've somehow shuffled the countries around, not just mislabelled them. That seems so much more labour intensive than getting it right!
posted by Trifling at 2:19 PM on March 15, 2015
My favourites have to be where they've somehow shuffled the countries around, not just mislabelled them. That seems so much more labour intensive than getting it right!
posted by Trifling at 2:19 PM on March 15, 2015
Yeah at lot of the more recent ones, produced for the web or TV, I'm just left wondering - how is it even possible to get this wrong? If you're making a map, you don't have to go and manually draw all the countries in. There are accurate, high quality, freely available GIS datasets available. How could you possibly make a map and just not have France on it? It doesn't seem technically possible.
posted by Jimbob at 2:22 PM on March 15, 2015 [4 favorites]
posted by Jimbob at 2:22 PM on March 15, 2015 [4 favorites]
How could you possibly make a map and just not have France on it? It doesn't seem technically possible.
Henry V had exactly this problem. He couldn't come up with a solution, either.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:42 PM on March 15, 2015 [2 favorites]
Henry V had exactly this problem. He couldn't come up with a solution, either.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:42 PM on March 15, 2015 [2 favorites]
I expected funny, but "The Los Angeles Times hates France" had me rolling.
posted by phildini at 2:52 PM on March 15, 2015
posted by phildini at 2:52 PM on March 15, 2015
The Guardian annexes Ireland
In the course of an otherwise excellent series of infographics on how Europe has changed since 1960, the liberal British newspaper appears to have finally realized the dreams of so many English imperial revivalists and annexed the entirety of Ireland to Her Majesty's rule.
Actually, it's the opposite, as sea borders are not shown. The Guardian's failure to portray the land border shows that the Republic has finally taken back Northern Ireland.
posted by Thing at 2:57 PM on March 15, 2015 [4 favorites]
In the course of an otherwise excellent series of infographics on how Europe has changed since 1960, the liberal British newspaper appears to have finally realized the dreams of so many English imperial revivalists and annexed the entirety of Ireland to Her Majesty's rule.
Actually, it's the opposite, as sea borders are not shown. The Guardian's failure to portray the land border shows that the Republic has finally taken back Northern Ireland.
posted by Thing at 2:57 PM on March 15, 2015 [4 favorites]
Most of these are simple bad geography, things mislabeled or misdrawn. That's a bit baffling in the era of open data and software map rendering, but it's innocuous. I'm much more worried about bad map data visualization. Like the classic problem of Red/Blue election maps which make the US look much more divided than it really is. There's a lot of nasty games you can play with projection, too, or misleading color scales.
How to Lie with Maps is a great book on this topic, particularly if you want to learn how to avoid making bad maps by accident. The dataisugly Subreddit also has a lot of interesting bad maps, typically where the data visualization is poor. The menace of climate change pie charts, for instance.
posted by Nelson at 3:21 PM on March 15, 2015 [10 favorites]
How to Lie with Maps is a great book on this topic, particularly if you want to learn how to avoid making bad maps by accident. The dataisugly Subreddit also has a lot of interesting bad maps, typically where the data visualization is poor. The menace of climate change pie charts, for instance.
posted by Nelson at 3:21 PM on March 15, 2015 [10 favorites]
I can actually understand how some of these maps went wrong. When I was a poor student struggling to make location maps, I didn't have good access to GIS software, so I would often make map graphics in Adobe. And sometimes I either didn't have the photoshop or illustrator/vector skills to pull out a map of say, just a few states from a larger one, or have a map with a few different colored states or something. Or maybe I didn't have the time to perfectly trace a state's outline, it varied.
So each time I would get the bright idea of downloading a set of all the states as individual files and then putting them together, and that way I could do what I wanted with each vector file. But it never worked right due to Mercator and other cartographic projections, or the sizing might not be scaled, and then I would spend an hour or an entire day with another, whole map in a background layer resizing and fixing each vector image. It was dumb and I would curse myself each time.
Some of these maps look exactly like that. The difference is that I was poor with poor graphic design/design software skills and no GIS, and this was early 00s. But I can totally see some graphics person tearing out their hair and shrieking that Belgium is the same size as France and they have no idea where these tiny countries go while a producer is yelling it's 3 minutes to go before they're on air.
posted by barchan at 3:22 PM on March 15, 2015 [2 favorites]
So each time I would get the bright idea of downloading a set of all the states as individual files and then putting them together, and that way I could do what I wanted with each vector file. But it never worked right due to Mercator and other cartographic projections, or the sizing might not be scaled, and then I would spend an hour or an entire day with another, whole map in a background layer resizing and fixing each vector image. It was dumb and I would curse myself each time.
Some of these maps look exactly like that. The difference is that I was poor with poor graphic design/design software skills and no GIS, and this was early 00s. But I can totally see some graphics person tearing out their hair and shrieking that Belgium is the same size as France and they have no idea where these tiny countries go while a producer is yelling it's 3 minutes to go before they're on air.
posted by barchan at 3:22 PM on March 15, 2015 [2 favorites]
Come on, the Ohio map is from Superpoop, made by Drew of Toothpaste for Dinner/Married to the Sea. A humorist. It's supposed to be stupid.
posted by Existential Dread at 3:48 PM on March 15, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by Existential Dread at 3:48 PM on March 15, 2015 [1 favorite]
Vox's caption begins, " This map, a 2009 creation by @drewtoothpaste, is one of the great viral maps of our time. Its utter uselessness is precisely the joke..."
I think they know.
posted by ardgedee at 4:50 PM on March 15, 2015 [1 favorite]
I think they know.
posted by ardgedee at 4:50 PM on March 15, 2015 [1 favorite]
How could you possibly make a map and just not have France on it? It doesn't seem technically possible.Evan Hensleigh has a possible explanation:
I’m assuming someone selected the Americas and deleted; France’s shape usually contains French Guyana & gets caught.posted by reluctant early bird at 5:17 PM on March 15, 2015 [6 favorites]
Map nerds on Reddit spent hours trying to figure out what is going on with this map, or even where it came from. There are no answers, only baffling wrongness.
A little more searching around reddit and you find the answer. It's a map from an alternate history website.
Keep up thegood work, Vox.
posted by jpe at 5:31 PM on March 15, 2015 [3 favorites]
A little more searching around reddit and you find the answer. It's a map from an alternate history website.
Keep up the
posted by jpe at 5:31 PM on March 15, 2015 [3 favorites]
Maps is hard, OK?
posted by jim in austin at 5:45 PM on March 15, 2015
posted by jim in austin at 5:45 PM on March 15, 2015
I'll take jokes I will only get because I'm smarter than most people for $1200, Alex.
posted by localroger at 5:59 PM on March 15, 2015
posted by localroger at 5:59 PM on March 15, 2015
I spent a number of years under the impression that Hawaii was in the Atlantic, because of course it is, cozied up with the other warm and sunny islands tucked away down there.
It's not as if I haven't spent the average amount of time in my life map-looking and state-placing. Some part of my brain just decided that "tropical islands are here" and I had to explain to people why I was apologizing for interrupting their breakfast at 5 p.m.
posted by the uncomplicated soups of my childhood at 6:08 PM on March 15, 2015
It's not as if I haven't spent the average amount of time in my life map-looking and state-placing. Some part of my brain just decided that "tropical islands are here" and I had to explain to people why I was apologizing for interrupting their breakfast at 5 p.m.
posted by the uncomplicated soups of my childhood at 6:08 PM on March 15, 2015
This reminds me of my 7th grade Geography text book, back when I was growing up in Dallas, Texas. There was a map of North America with the United States of America and then a large greyed out space above it that was unlabeled.
That I am now a Canadian citizen and live in this large greyed out space only makes it that much more funny. I still wonder where I am sometimes.
posted by Fizz at 6:14 PM on March 15, 2015 [2 favorites]
That I am now a Canadian citizen and live in this large greyed out space only makes it that much more funny. I still wonder where I am sometimes.
posted by Fizz at 6:14 PM on March 15, 2015 [2 favorites]
When I was young, I used to think there were two big islands out there in the water: Alaska and Hawaii. Many maps would just draw the outline of Alaska and stick it out there with Hawaii to show all 50 states....
posted by CrowGoat at 6:59 PM on March 15, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by CrowGoat at 6:59 PM on March 15, 2015 [1 favorite]
That I am now a Canadian citizen and live in this large greyed out space only makes it that much more funny. I still wonder where I am sometimes.
Oooh, Barrie.
posted by the uncomplicated soups of my childhood at 7:07 PM on March 15, 2015 [3 favorites]
Oooh, Barrie.
posted by the uncomplicated soups of my childhood at 7:07 PM on March 15, 2015 [3 favorites]
barchan: "But I can totally see some graphics person tearing out their hair and shrieking that Belgium is the same size as France and they have no idea where these tiny countries go while a producer is yelling it's 3 minutes to go before they're on air."
Or they hand it to the intern to add the labels thinking, "Everyone knows where Argentina is," or "Surely he would notice if Chicago ended up in Ohio (on a Chicago-area weather map in a Chicago publication) due to a software error," or the graphics guy is so drunk he fell asleep at his desk and the news editor is desperately trying to get the half-completed map to do what it's supposed to do and he knows how to do exactly three things in photoshop and can't find the commands in the menus because they've all moved, or the graphics guy thinks, "Hey, I bet if I labeled 'Austria' as 'Australia,' none of those hack editors will notice, that'll be hilarious" ... there are just a lot of paths to wrongness in a newsroom.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:31 PM on March 15, 2015
Or they hand it to the intern to add the labels thinking, "Everyone knows where Argentina is," or "Surely he would notice if Chicago ended up in Ohio (on a Chicago-area weather map in a Chicago publication) due to a software error," or the graphics guy is so drunk he fell asleep at his desk and the news editor is desperately trying to get the half-completed map to do what it's supposed to do and he knows how to do exactly three things in photoshop and can't find the commands in the menus because they've all moved, or the graphics guy thinks, "Hey, I bet if I labeled 'Austria' as 'Australia,' none of those hack editors will notice, that'll be hilarious" ... there are just a lot of paths to wrongness in a newsroom.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:31 PM on March 15, 2015
The "SuperBowl wins by country" map is pure genius. You could do a whole series of those maps: "French parliamentary elections by country," or "Canadian provinces by country." Having the full color bar in the key is what makes it perfect.
In terms of genuinely bad maps, I get handed reports and proposals all the time that were produced using maps made by student interns. I have to give the interns credit for constantly finding new and creative ways of either failing to show the information they were meant to put on the map, or inadvertently creating deceptive maps. Cartography is trickier than it looks, and people don't tend to give it much thought.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:11 PM on March 15, 2015 [3 favorites]
In terms of genuinely bad maps, I get handed reports and proposals all the time that were produced using maps made by student interns. I have to give the interns credit for constantly finding new and creative ways of either failing to show the information they were meant to put on the map, or inadvertently creating deceptive maps. Cartography is trickier than it looks, and people don't tend to give it much thought.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:11 PM on March 15, 2015 [3 favorites]
The "How far away is Ohio" map really only fails because it includes Rhode Island. For Rhode Islanders, to whom Connecticut is "way too fah," Ohio should be classed as "Might as Well Be the Moon."
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:32 AM on March 16, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:32 AM on March 16, 2015 [1 favorite]
reluctant early bird: "Evan Hensleigh has a possible explanation:In that case the Netherlands should have been deleted as well.
I’m assuming someone selected the Americas and deleted; France’s shape usually contains French Guyana & gets caught."
posted by brokkr at 5:00 AM on March 16, 2015
My favorite thing about the Super Bowl wins by country map is it's using something like the Wagner IV projection. It's not some crappy map thrown on a Google Mercator thing, they picked a whole-earth projection that's unfamiliar but better suited for data visualization. So that we can more accurately see the distribution of Super Bowl wins by country. It's masterful trolling.
posted by Nelson at 8:19 AM on March 16, 2015
posted by Nelson at 8:19 AM on March 16, 2015
Yeah, well, when I was in the 7th grade I took a geography course. On the final test, my overall grade was based largely on labeling the 50 countries of Europe on a blank map. Oh Yeah. I got them all correct. Some of them no longer seem to exist. I can remember a teacher trying to explain the map changes inspired by WWI, but I don't remember ever understanding what the fuck he was trying to tell me. I thought countries were always, you know, there.
BTW, we didn't bother with Africa, because in those days it was the Dark Continent, and had "unexplored territory" labels on a large part of the "interior." In newsreels we were told that no white man had ever set foot there. I'm not making this up.
posted by mule98J at 8:29 AM on March 16, 2015
BTW, we didn't bother with Africa, because in those days it was the Dark Continent, and had "unexplored territory" labels on a large part of the "interior." In newsreels we were told that no white man had ever set foot there. I'm not making this up.
posted by mule98J at 8:29 AM on March 16, 2015
I spent a number of years under the impression that Hawaii was in the Atlantic, because of course it is, cozied up with the other warm and sunny islands tucked away down there.
I will always fondly remember chatting with some British grad students about my upcoming vacation to California, from which they sincerely assumed I could make a day trip (by sailboat) to Hawaii and back.
posted by psoas at 11:06 AM on March 16, 2015
I will always fondly remember chatting with some British grad students about my upcoming vacation to California, from which they sincerely assumed I could make a day trip (by sailboat) to Hawaii and back.
posted by psoas at 11:06 AM on March 16, 2015
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