The ties that bind

August 22, 2006 12:12 PM

The International Networks Archiveis an effort by a group of sociologists to understand 2,000 years of globalization through mapping the network of transactions that link the world, rather than geography. The project is still ongoing, but you can see some of the results: an interactive map that uses travel time to visualize the world; a graphic of the growth of Starbucks and McDonalds; the distribution of government jobs (apparently the 3,412 postal inspectors can carry firearms); the cashflows of movies and tobacco; and, of course, the world at night. There is also access to a lot of detailed data, as well as more maps and information at the Mapping Globalization wiki.
posted by blahblahblah (5 comments total)

Apparently Canadians watch no movies.

Also, I demand an animated map to show the diffusion of animated map technology.
posted by CheeseburgerBrown at 12:32 PM on August 22, 2006

Double. Those charts still suck.

And yeah, postal inspectors can carry firearms. They're basically cops.
posted by mr_roboto at 12:36 PM on August 22, 2006

It's always interesting for me to see what other people are doing in the field of networks, but this site is kind of a letdown. Beyond the overly glitzy Time/Newsweek-style graphics that frankly didn't have a lot of information value, the source datasets they make available are shockingly sparse. Some PDFs & spreadsheets seems to be the best they can put out there. Very slick presentation, but not a lot of meat. Where's the networks? They could learn a lot from Edward Tufte.
posted by scalefree at 12:48 PM on August 22, 2006

mr_robot - dang, not just a double but a recent double! My bad, though it didn't help that the first poster didn't link to the main site, or use the name of the group (rather than just the acronym). Ah well, for those who have seen it before, you may want to look at the link to the Wiki and the interactive map, which haven't been covered before.
posted by blahblahblah at 12:49 PM on August 22, 2006

oh, and I meant mr_roboto of course - I would never confuse you with mister robot.
posted by blahblahblah at 7:49 PM on August 22, 2006