A BRIEF INSIGHT INTO THE REPRESENTATIONS OF THE WORLD THROUGH EIGHT DIFFERENT PROJECTIONS

Rebecca Gill (OHS)

The Map of the World is a recognisable and iconic figure, familiar to children and adults alike, being presented in everyday life in all sorts of forms, from classrooms and offices to the latest data and evidence in several fields. Clearly this graphical figure holds a lot of importance within society in politics, economics, geography, art and many other categories. However, through time there have been several different representations of the world that aren’t quite as identifiable.

The Mercator Projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Mercator_projection

The Mercator Projection, perhaps the most commonly used projection, has been criticised for portraying the sizes of countries inaccurately, particularly in regards to the minimisation of certain areas of the globe, noticeably the continent of Africa, and the enlargement of countries within Europe, for instance. Some have claimed that these inaccurate projections have caused people to have a biased view on the level and rate of development in certain affected countries. Because of this, several cartographers have set about creating their own world maps, one example of these unusual projections is the Dymaxion Map released by R Buckminster Fuller (1954). It was created with the aim of making a map of the world with no “right way up” by removing the usual look of the two poles. Although the net shape is completely different and now in the form of an icosahedron, the scale of the distance between the countries is relatively similar to the Mercator projection. :https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map

In addition to this, in the past, many early world maps featured the cartographer’s country of origin as the centre point - even sometimes depicting the world in the reverse orientation, contrary to what many would think of as the normal.

Muhammed al-Idrisi’s south-up map of Europe, Asia and northern Africa (1154) depicting the Arabian Peninsula in the centre of the map pointing upwards.

Another instance of this is Peirce Quincuncial - made in 1879 by Charles Sanders Pierce. This map projects the world by laying it out into four quadrants, again placing the North Pole in the centre of the map, enabling this map to be tiled perfectly and is therefore used as a model in 360° photography.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peirce_quincuncial_projection

The Sinu-Mollweide is a projection that was developed in 1953. Taking inspiration from certain previous world maps, Allen K Philbrick sought to create a projection with the goal of challenging what people thought of as how a flattened form of the usual world map should