Only Maps and Horses

I increasingly hear quite a lot of the latest buzz about this map and that map but where is this noise coming from?

We're seeing the maps we're seeing because of one thing...ubiquity and ease of construction has created an appetite for them. Where there is a demand, someone is always going to meet the demand. The demand at the moment however is for quantity, not quality and there are plenty of middle men anxious to provide a mechanism to push their wares. These are the Del 'Boy' Trotter of the cartographic world. Buy cheap, Buy quantity, Sell at a markup and without a care for the consumer or the quality of the product you're shifting. Think yellow peril...

Take, for example, 'Amazing Maps'. Their Facebook and Twitter pages have tens of thousands of followers and so on...the site exists simply to push maps that are found on the internet to their followers. I'm one of them but for every one that piques my interest and which I find genuinely intriguing, well made and purposeful, there are dozens more that fail on a very basic cartographic level.  Often the maps display disturbing mistakes.  I see them. So do other experts. But most do not...they are busy being experts in their own field and simply see the map, consume it and move on.  Take today for example...here's a map of the Winter Olympics medal count they pushed:

Anyone who knows anything about mapping will immediately spot two glaring issues...the data are not normalised and the colour scheme is truly unhelpful in allowing readers to rapidly see the patterns. Here's a version I made...it's not particularly attention-grabbing but it's constructed with basic principles in mind so we are better able to see the patterns.

Not only are the patterns modified when you normalize so they can be properly compared against one another against a constant baseline measure but light to dark means less to more. I'm afraid spectral colours aren't read like that by humans - we see 'difference', not 'quantity' so although in the first example I can tell Australia has a different count to China and Norway...I don't know in which order. Purple 'looks' more than light blue (because it's darker) but if you look at the legend China has more medals. But once normalized, actually they have no more per capita than Australia meaning that they are pretty much equally successful. Sure, China gets more medals overall but then have a massive population by comparison so you'd expect more medals. We normalize to allow us to visually compare like for like. And are the USA really as good as the top map suggests being in the next to top class? No...given their population, actually their winter medal haul is relatively poor and on a par with the UK per capita.

So, back to the point...is the daily consumption of bad maps bad for you? I would say yes because you're getting the wrong message. It's a waste of map calories.  I'm all for quick and dirty maps made well...but not ones that are constructed shambolically and peddled to us by people who know no difference.

I mentioned this myself on Twitter a while ago and someone said to me that while they agree, they like fine restaurants but also dive into Subway on occasion.  I've used the food analogy before but I think it needs to be more subtle here. Sure...go to a Heston Blumenthal restaurant and enjoy fine dining. Go to Subway and enjoy a sandwich too.  Both different 'qualities' of food in all likelihood. However...would you want to go into Subway and order a meatball sub that comes with the meatball on the outside, trying desperately to envelop some bread? At least Subway construct their sandwiches according to the basic rules.  Bread on the outside, filling in the middle so it works on a basic level as a sandwich even though it might taste like crap (taste, of course, is a different argument altogether).

That, for me, is the problem with a lot of maps...they suffer from basic constructional issues that really affects their performance as maps. Yet the appetite is there because the 124,000 Twitter followers that @Amazingmaps has dwarfs the combined Twitter following of at least 50 of my map expert friends combined by some margin. Tabloid newspapers have higher circulations than quality broadsheets. The reporting is dubious. Same with maps...it's just that maps have in the last 10 years suddenly entered this realm of ubiquity so now we have professional cartographers along with good map-makers and not-so-good map makers and who cares who makes the map, how it's made or if it's any good because it all sells.

No-one seems particularly bothered who made the map and what their cartographic qualifications are when they peddle maps they find on the internet yet I would strongly argue that being authoritative in your domain is crucial in distinguishing quality work from the masses. It's therefore not the fault of the makers of map-making tools or the map-makers themselves that we see so many poor maps. Just like any service based on mass consumption, if the demand is there, there will be someone keen to feed it regardless of the quality. The demand is for maps, good, bad, big, small, whatever. There are plenty of people and organisations that have set themselves up in the last few years to satiate the demand purely to serve their own agenda of being purveyors of content. How many of these have any real cartographic credibility? Take a look...you won't find many publicly visible examples that have a strong cartographic background. Such sites are not curated by people who know anything about maps. That much is obvious.

Over at the International Cartographic Association blog we're trying to arrest this by providing a quality broadsheet version of Amazing Maps, set up as an antidote to tabloid cartography. I'd love you to go take a look and share the links if you care. We're running a daily series called 'MapCarte' where we're showcasing a curated map that evidences high quality classic and contemporary cartography. Beautiful maps, made well and described to explain something of why the map is regarded highly.

Maybe the Twitter handle @AmazinglyBadMaps was taken? In truth what they're peddling is potentially interesting data mapped poorly. It's like Del Boy's paint...perfectly decent paint but painting a Chinese restaurant in British Rail luminous yellow just doesn't work. If you prefer eating at a decent restaurant rather than Del Boy's painted Golden Lotus then head over to MapCarte and gorge yourself.

Does it matter if the map is wrong?

Dear @BBC_Magazine,
Today you had a nice little article online asking 'Olympic Counties: Does it matter where medal-winners come from?'. You even begin with the phrase 'A geographical breakdown of Team GB's Olympic success reveals some areas with more prizes than others'. It's a pleasant enough commentary on social and spatial identity and belonging and the way in which towns and cities across the UK are claiming association with Olympic medalists....and you point out in a very British way the error of most of this with facts about the real place where Andy Murray was born or how Yorkshire is in fact not a single place etc etc.

The trouble is...you go and spoil all that 'my county is more important than yours' with a map that fails in truly Olympian fashion:

Ollie O'Brien (@oobr) was astute enough to take a screen grad (thanks to him for passing it on to me) and pointed out the first wave of mistakes on Twitter (Aberdeen not being in Aberdeenshire; Plymouth not having a medal, Edinburgh in the wrong place etc).

The map seemed to be very rapidly 'fixed' with a series of iterations during the day.  On the one hand I applaud the BBC for taking note of Ollie's constructive criticism and making corrections rather than ignoring them. On the other...you've missed a belter of an error. Here is the map as it was still being shown by the following day...

You've gone and done it again...mapped raw numbers using a choropleth (BBC is developing a habit of doing this).

Mapping totals in this way is completely spurious.  You've got to adjust for the different sized areas and populations (normalise). Yes, London is a big city and Greater London has a population of 8278251 and 10 medal winners.  That's 0.12 medals per 100,000 people. Cardiff has a population of 346100 and 4 medal winnesr.  That equates to 1.16 medals per 100,000 people.  So the population of Greater London is nearly 24 times larger than Cardiff...it's therefore perfectly reasonable to expect (all other things being equal) that more medalists will hail from the Greater London area despite Cardiff actually doing far better in relative terms.  The point about the map is that to compare one area's medal haul to another requires you to modify the raw counts precisely to allow readers to compare them on a per capita basis.  As it stands your map presents a meaningless distribution.

Other than that glaring error... nice colours. Check. Clear labels. Check.  All going well so far but wait...this is an article about assigning medal counts to place of birth and yet you assign medals to the Cities of Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Cardiff and others to large counties and that's after citing work from Dr Garner of Aston university whose work makes clear that people's loyalties are much more localised (estates, areas and, at most, a town or city). You've used a nicely inconsistent mix of English county boundaries, Scottish council Areas, Welsh unitary authorities and Northern Irish council areas.  What happened to English unitary authorities? In fact what happened to Plymouth...it was shown as a unitary authority on version one without a medal, then it magically disappeared in version 2. Maybe a proportional symbol map centred on cities would have been a better approach to at least be consistent? While we're talking about consistency, are you labeling counties or cities? You label London yet shown the Greater London boundary.

So I re-did the map.  The map below shows the per-capita distribution on the left and whaddya know...actually London didn't do so well in relative terms.  I also fixed the issues with the boundaries so there is at least consistency.  And if you still insist on mapping totals, the version on the right maps the raw medal totals as a proportional symbol map.

So, BBC, you wrote an article about the importance of place and identity yet failed monumentally in using that most geographical of tools...a map, to illustrate the facts. In so doing you destroy any faith the reader has in your report and for those who don't recognise the errors, you perpetuate misconceptions through erroneous cartography.

Does it matter if the map is wrong?  Well, yes, particularly in an article about geography, place, spatial identity and where the basis of the discussion is about comparisons between places.

PS...Before someone cries foul that I didn't include Northern Ireland or the Isle of Man, Channel Islands or any of the 9 foreign countries that Team GB medalists hail from...I know...I'm sorry...I just didn't have the time or data to go to those lengths and all this blog was supposed to do was make a general point rather than build a perfect replacement.

Mapping NBC Olympic Opening Ceremony coverage

There has been plenty of constenation about the coverage of the Olympics that US broadcaster NBC is subjecting US subscribers to. Given I now reside in the US I have seen first hand the abomination. It is truly the most excrutiating experience ever.  Delayed broadcasts, more ads than athletes, inane commentary and yes (though to be at least partly expected) an almost entire focus on US athletes.  I wouldn't mind the last of these because it is a US broadcaster after all but I'd have hoped for at least some coverage of other nations and sports that don't have a US medal hope.  Anyway, this is a blog about mapping so...

A couple of weeks ago I presented a range of simple thematic web maps I'd built for the 2012 Esri User Conference on medal hauls and competitor counts.  The purpose was really to demonstrate how to design and construct them using ArcGIS so if you're interested you can take a look here (and let me know what you think!).

I was also developing a map of the NBC opening ceremony coverage but Andrew Shears beat me to it (here) as part of a terrific critique of NBC's coverage.  The map he built shows the amount of air time given to each country during the Parade of Nations at the opening ceremony.  NBC's heavy editing seemed to present a somewhat unbalanced viewing experience and I too was keen to map the air time data.  Every country was subjected to some comment about their political status, struggles, crises, war and religious 'difference'.  Some of the commentary was not just ignorant but bordered on bigotry with commentators poking fun at country names, customs and such like (often mispronounced).

I show my version of Andrew's map below, illustrating those countries that received more 'air time' in darker shades using the same classification scheme as he did.  Andrew called his map 'NBC's Geographic Imagination' and as it stands it serves the purpose of illustrating how the US perceives the rest of the world.

So no surprises eh? Team USA and the host nation (Great Britain) get huge air time followed by Australia, China and then the rest of the world.  But just a moment...while I entirely concur that many nations were short-changed (particularly those eschewed in favour of ad breaks or those immediately after Team USA that were largely overlooked), looking at the total air time doesn't really tell the whole story.  While it is true that NBC controlled their delayed coverage and made editorial decisions about the time each nation was on air ('edited for an American audience' we are told), surely the number of competitors plays a key part in this metric?  Simply put, a nation with hundreds of athletes takes far longer to enter the stadium than a smaller one with only a handful.  This, then, is a great example of how mapping totals on a choropleth doesn't always reveal the story (though it does reveal a story).  Before I present an alternative, I re-classified the total air time into quantiles...

It's the same as the first map but just re-classified in terms of the categories each nation falls into.  Now, take a look at the following map...

This is a map of the total air time for each nation, normalised by taking account of the number of competitors to give air time per athlete.   It's classified using quantiles so it is immediately comparable (in visual terms) to the previous map. And what a different picture!

The map can now be viewed as a level playing field (pun intended) and on this basis, one could argue that NBC were actually rather generous to many nations in comparison to coverage of Team USA and the other well represented teams. Certainly, many African nations did well.  As you might expect, the main competitors in terms of the all important medal table (China, Russia) didn't do so well and competitors in certain disciplines (Australia in swimming for instance) also received less coverage.  So while there was a clear bias in some elements of NBCs editing, the map of total air time doesn't really tell the whole story.

That said, viewing the ceremony did leave one with a sense of foreboding as our brains aren't that good at working out relative proportions on the fly.  In that sense at least, NBC didn't do very much to counter the various accusations of bias and poor editorial judgement.

Finally, is a map the best way to look at this relationship? Take a look at the following scattergraph (which excludes Team USA and Great Britain as their large teams and large air time are significant outliers). Number of athletes is on the y (vertical axis) and seconds of air time on the x (horizontal) axis.

So we have a reasonable spread and there is some sense of a positive correlation (albeit a weak one) that shows the proportion of air time broadly equates to the number of athletes where a nation has over 100 athletes.  But look below that 100 athlete line...there are dozens of nations receiving a lot of air time with relatively few athletes. So in this sense the scatter graph at least supports the notion that a map normalised by competitors at least tells a more realistic story.

Just another example of how maps can mislead the innocent.