Strange Maps
A special series by Frank Jacobs.
Frank has been writing about strange maps since 2006, published a book on the subject in 2009 and joined Big Think in 2010. Readers send in new material daily, and he keeps bumping in to cartography that is delightfully obscure, amazingly beautiful, shockingly partisan, and more. "Each map tells a story, but the stories told by your standard atlas for school or reference are limited and literal: they show only the most practical side of the world, its geography and its political divisions. Strange Maps aims to collect and comment on maps that do everything but that - maps that show the world from a different angle."
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All Stories
The second dip of the worldwide recession is a bit like that scene in Monty Python’s Holy Grail, where two guards stupidly stare at a horseless knight approaching in the […]
Mapping the many paths from fully bearded to clean-shaven
Finding maps that are sufficiently strange and beautiful is only half the joy of making this blog; the other is writing up the story to go along with them. But […]
To avoid the German air force bombing Paris, the French built a fake version of their capital
The explosive growth of the micro-blogging service’s global popularity is emblematic of a trend affecting the entire internet: it’s becoming less American, and less Anglophone.
The maps discussed on this blog are rarely of any hard, practical use. This one does have real-world relevance – especially if you’re a globetrotting, It’s-Tuesday-so-this-must-be-Belarus kind of traveller. Living […]
The plural of Texas? My money’s on Texases, even though that sounds almost as wrong as Texae, Texi or whatever alternative you might try to think up. Texas is defiantly […]
How a riddle involving one river, two islands and seven bridges prompted a mathematician to lay the foundation for graph theory
Your city is an egg. Most likely a scrambled one.
Wine maps are appreciated mainly by the select few who are both cartophiles and oenophiles. Those who are either or neither face a formidable obstacle to cartographic enjoyment, inherent in […]
The Eurovision Song Contest is a resounding success in at least one respect. Set up as a laboratory of European harmony – musically, audiovisually and politically – its first edition […]
A body of running water may be called any of many different names, the most generic being stream, the most common being river. A river can be defined as ‘a […]
Transcript of an extract from BBC Radio 4 entertainment interview show Chain Reaction (first broadcast on 26 August 2011). Intersperse with a good deal of [live studio laughter]. Kevin Eldon: […]
“[This is] really a most imaginative way not just to map, but also to empower,” writes Thomas Theis Nielsen of the HarassMap, which plots the incidence of various types of […]
A fabulous Rheinpanorama from the early days of leisure travel
Two straight lines connect Glastonbury to Armageddon
What if colonisers and colonised swapped places (and climates)?
No matter how detailed the map, for some it will always be large enough to separate Us from Them
This rudimentary map, showing an Iran crudely cut in two, is currently making the rounds of social media in that country. Its message, as clear as it is simple, is […]
Who you gonna call? Somebody inside your data community, that’s who.
It only has one job: instil map readers with fear and revulsion.
“We are the mediocre presidents. You won’t find our faces on dollars or on cents! There’s Taylor, there’s Tyler, There’s Fillmore and there’s Hayes. There’s William Henry Harrison,” (Harrison:) “I […]
Everybody, meet Kergolus. This little furry thing is a geo-mascot, shaped like the territory it symbolises. Top marks if you’re able to guess which territory that is, either by the […]
With typically Hibernian hyperbole, James Joyce once claimed that “if [Dublin] suddenly disappeared from the earth, it could be reconstructed from my book.” That book would of course be Ulysses […]
The first set of maps labels each and every one of the states as best and worst at something. All of those distinctions, both the favourable and the unfavourable kind, are backed up by some sort of evidence.
Elm Point and Buffalo Bay Point are quite possibly America’s most obscure exclaves in Canada.
The ship has been a popular metaphor for statecraft since at least the Ancient Greeks. The ‘ship of state’ was mentioned by Aeschylus in Seven Against Thebes (467 BC), and […]
It had been ages since I’d been in Shoreditch – West Londoners generally never stray east of Tower Bridge – but visiting relatives were determined to inspect the cool clubs […]