Great Salt Lake

In his book, How to Lie with Maps, Mark Monmonier discusses "cartographic agendas", and how, in the 1960s, the United States Geological Survey finally started removing racial slurs from place names (such as "Nigger Creek"). Almost as an aside, he mentions this little quirk about USGS topographic maps:

While liberals wring their hands over the mapmaker's do-it-by-the-book intransigence over racial slurs, fiscal conservatives might object with equal vigor to the perfectly executed, largely blue maps of wholly inundated quadrangles in the middle of the Great Salt Lake. A case in point is the Rozel Point SW, Utah, 7.5-minute quadrangle, which derives its name from a land feature on the next row up, one sheet to the right. Except for the titles, grid lines, and marginal notations similar to those on maps of Fresno and Kalamazoo, the 1:24,000 Rozel Point SW sheet is a featureless light-blue rectangle adorned only by a note at the center

Utah: Index to topographic and other Map Coverage, USGS, National Mapping Program

At my library, we are a Federal Document Depository and we have a complete collection of United States 1:24,000 scale topographic maps. As you can see by the index example above, the entire nation is divided into a grid. Each grid rectangle is a named map. Intrigued by Monmonier's story, I had to see for myself. I pulled out the Rozel Point SW sheet and here it is (right). A big blue blank. The only information to be found on this map is the name of the body of water, and its elevation (below).
(Sorry for the poor image... I need a better camera.)

Bureacracy beats commons sense every time...

But, I wonder... does the USGS know something we don't know? Perhaps Rozel Point SW is a place holder for a future map... After global warming...

The graphic to the right, from Commonly Asked Questions About Utah's Great Salt Lake (Utah Geological Survey), illustrates how the water level of the Great Salt Lake has fluctuated over the years.

Perhaps the USGS has topographic maps of the "Rozel Point Salt Flats" ready for the day that the Great Salt Lake dries up...

UPDATE 2/6: "jesssse" reminds me that the earthwork sculpture "Spriral Jetty" is located at the actual Rozel Point (grid coordinate D6). Constructed in 1970, it was built of mud, salt crystals, basalt rocks, earth, and water. The Spriral Jetty has been in the news lately; threatened by a wildcat oil operation on the Great Salt Lake.

United Countries of Football

In honor of the National Football League playoffs, that begin this evening, I present the United Countries of Football:

In August, when the baseball pennant races were starting to heat up, Strange Maps brought this map to my attention. The United Countries of Baseball, presented by Nike. Imagine the United States (and Ontario) divided into separate countries based on their allegience to a Major League Baseball team. Since I much prefer American Football over baseball, yesterday I started looking for a similar "United Countries of Fooball".

I couldn't find one from Nike, but while searching, I did come across this one, a hand drawn football fan map of the United States. I found this map on PFCcritics.com (artist unknown). The map is clever, but incomplete... he turned the entire state of Ohio over to the Browns, and ignored that the Chiefs share a state with the Rams, and the Jaguars and Buccaneers are also in Florida along with the Dolphins.

Continuing the search, I got very close to my goal with this map from The CommonCensus Map Project. The CCMP is "redrawing the map of the United States based on your input, to reveal the boundaries people themselves feel, as opposed to the state and county boundaries drawn by politicians." I'll have more on this project in a future post, but a "side project" of the CCMP is the CommonCensus Sports Map project. This map plots fan loyalties to American sports teams. It's very close, but still not a thematic companion to the Nike map.

Since I could not find the perfect map, I decided to make my own. I present the United Countries of Football:



This map is based on the data from the CCMP, as well as my own fanciful notion of how the nation might be divided, if regions were obliged to divide based on team loyalty. Your mileage may vary... For instance I am a Detroit Lions fan living in the Cincinnati Bengals country. Where do you draw the dividing line in Ohio between Bengals and Browns fans? In Missouri between Chiefs and Rams fans? etc. Feel free to comment and question my assumptions about your region of the country.

However, there is something wrong with this map. Because many of the western states are geographically large, but sparsely populated, this map give the false impression that the Denver Broncos have the largest fanbase. As discussed in my earlier post, The Purple states of America, maps can "lie" or present false impressions. So, I replaced the map above with a similar map using Mark Newman's population cartogram:



Now we see a more even distrubution of fans throughout the country.

By the time I finished this map last night, it was getting late, and I started feeling a little silly (as if all these maps so far are not silly). So, I carried the idea of independent countries based on fan loyalty to its logical conclusion. At the end of the football season, there were only twelve nations left standing. I imagined the Division winners as conquerors over their Divisional rivals (except for the Wild Card teams), then redrew the map to show the conquered territory:



You know what this means, of course... you will now be subjected to at least four more of these silly maps until the Super Bowl winner unites the country under one United Country of Football. Will the New England Patriots complete their perfect season? Can the Indianapolis Colts repeat? Can anyone else stop them? For what it is worth, I am predicting that Indianapolis will shock the Patriots in the AFC Championship game, then go on to beat the Seattle Seahawks in the Super Bowl. You read it here first (although my picks are notoriously bad).

UPDATE 1/6: Wildcard Weekend Results

UPDATE 1/13: Divisional Playoff Results

UPDATE 1/20: Conference Championship Results

UPDATE 2/3: Super Bowl Results

Maps not only decorate but send subtle or subliminal messages

Today I finished re-reading How to Lie with Maps by Mark Monmonier. In his epilogue, he summed up, in part, what this blog is all about:

Let me conclude with a cautionary note about the increased likelihood of cartographic distortion when a map must play the dual role of both informing and impressing its audience. Savvy map viewers must recognize that not all maps are intended solely to inform the viewer about location or geographic relationships. As visual stimuli, maps can look pretty, intriguing, or important. As graphic fashion statements, maps not only decorate but send subtle or subliminal messages about their authors, sponsors, or publishers.

The Politcal Clout of Fairfax County, Virginia

The Commonwealth of Virginia has been a fairly solid Republican state from many years. However, in response to President Bush's "unpopularity", Democrats gained control of the State Senate in last Tuesday's voting.

See: The Washington Post's Virginia Post-Election Roundup

In my previous post, I pointed to maps that demonstrate the cartographic "lie" of the national electoral map. Here, in yet another interesting map blog, The Electoral Map, Patrick Ottenhoff points out that the shift in State politics can be attributed, chiefly, to a shift in the voting pattern of the most populous county in the state: Fairfax County, suburb of Washington, D.C.



This map demonstrates the population of Fairfax County, relative to the rest of the state.

The Purple States of America

In How to Lie with Maps, Mark Monmonier discusses how maps can give false impressions. A perfect example of this is the map of the United States used to show "popularity". Many of the physically large states in the West have relatively smaller populations than the "smaller" states in the East.

Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman of the University of Michigan make an excellent demonstration of this cartographic "lie" with their analysis of voting in the 2004 Presidential Election. Some sample maps:

To look at a standard electoral map of the United States, it would appear that a significant majority of the nation is "red", or voting Republican. Look at all the "red" on the map!:



However, if you make a population cartogram (adjusting the size of the states by their relative population) you can see just how close the election really was:



Yet, is Ohio really all red, and Michigan really all blue? Of course not. So if you color the nation county-by-county, and give those counties different shades of colors between red and blue, based on how strong the vote was, you get something like this:



So, basically, after the 2004 election, the nation was one big bruise...

Read the full analysis and progression of 2004 presidential Electoral maps, or the author's breakdown of the 2006 Congressional elections, or more fun with international socio-economic cartograms as well as the World Mapper.

How to Lie with Maps

How to Lie with Maps (2nd ed.) by Mark Monmonier, University Of Chicago Press, 1996



I am currently re-reading this book after I read the first edition nearly fifteen years ago, right about the same time I was beginning to collect intersting examples of maps. It is a must-read for map lovers, map makers, and anyone who uses maps for information (that would be everyone...).

From the back of the book:

Originally published to wide acclaim, this lively, cleverly illustrated essay on the use and abuse of maps teaches us how to evaluate maps critically and promotes a healthy skepticism about these easy-to-manipulate models of reality. Monmonier shows that, despite their immense value, maps lie. In fact, they must.

He begins with a tutorial on how all maps must make little "white lies" in order generalize and simplify their information. In later chapters he discusses how maps can and have been used for propoganda, to promote a specific point of view, and to disinform.

As I have said before, I am no expert, but in future posts I plan to bring forward additional and contemporary examples of "how to lie with maps."