Hello, cartographer here while a lot of the things she says are right as someone who makes maps for a living I will never use the Equal Earth projection for a world map. The point of a world map is to easily see all ~180 countries at a glance. The new map is objectively worse at it because it basically shrinks everywhere but the countries on the equator and then speeds out. So that mostly means Africa and Oceania and South America stay roughly the same size. That means North America, Europe, and Asia are all a lot smaller and less legible. That’s like 80% of the world’s population you just made less legible. While true land scale is important it doesn’t necessarily mean it provides the best map. This is then exacerbated when whatever map in question is shrunk down to be a figure in a textbook. So frankly I just see this as political posturing with very little substance.
Furthermore if we did change it there are better options like Winkle Triple.
Doesn't the map you draw/use depend on the audience and what you want to use it for? Saying that you're NEVER going to use the Equal Earth projection is dramatic.
Yes that is true, I just think there are better projections than equal earth at what equal earth is trying to achieve. Like the point is to eliminate bias, but we are still using a North/South up/down when we could just eliminate the entire thing by using dymaxion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map
There are multiple issues with the Dymaxion map that make it not really practical.
- Printed on a textbook or a poster it's almost 50% wasted space. Not only does that look straight up ugly, it means you have much smaller countries in the same amount of space.
- Distances between land masses and relative position is absurdly hard to figure out, to South America in particular.
- You can't use cardinal directions with this map in any practicality, which is a given for basically every other map you ever see (not only world maps).
- It's too different from literally any other map anyone (other than cartographers and map enthusiasts) is used to seeing so there would be a lot of friction with transition.
This and other esoteric projections are only "better" in the same way as a software engineer I can tell people it's "better" to use a command line to use their computer and install programs.
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u/Narpity 23h ago
Hello, cartographer here while a lot of the things she says are right as someone who makes maps for a living I will never use the Equal Earth projection for a world map. The point of a world map is to easily see all ~180 countries at a glance. The new map is objectively worse at it because it basically shrinks everywhere but the countries on the equator and then speeds out. So that mostly means Africa and Oceania and South America stay roughly the same size. That means North America, Europe, and Asia are all a lot smaller and less legible. That’s like 80% of the world’s population you just made less legible. While true land scale is important it doesn’t necessarily mean it provides the best map. This is then exacerbated when whatever map in question is shrunk down to be a figure in a textbook. So frankly I just see this as political posturing with very little substance.
Furthermore if we did change it there are better options like Winkle Triple.