Projections

I've written a few times before about maps and the inaccuracy of the Mercator projection. CUNY history professor Angus Johnston had a thread today that's worth reading about a range of map projections, showing several different ones. I gather it's based on one of his lectures about the topic.

As in those earlier posts (linked below), I found myself shaking my head once again about this, one of the most egregious inaccuracies of Mercator. It compares the actual size of Greenland to the actual size of the African continent: 

I haven't looked into map projections enough to have heard of the Robinson projection, which appears to be much more popular than Mercator among academics in terms of balancing the various inaccuracies inherent in mapping a sphere to a flat surface. This is what it looks like:

A key thing the Robinson projection does is keep the equator at the center point where it belongs, rather than truncating the Southern Hemisphere as Mercator does. And obviously, it has much more of a partially curved shape, keeping the lines of latitude more equally spaced and horizontal, instead of curved.

One of the things Robinson maintains, however, is the north-south orientation we are all familiar with from almost every map in general use. Johnston shared a few other projections that broke with that. 

This one centers on Africa, similar to Robinson or Mercator:

This one centers on the Pacific, for an even more unfamiliar appearance:

The world is a real place, but our maps of it are human creations. Projections, in more than one sense of the word.

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Earlier posts about map projections:

2018: Some land masses have more to mass than others

2014: Bigger than it looks…and it's still not a country