Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Fun with Hemispheres

The final edits on the book are now done! Stay tuned for the great unveiling of After the Map in the spring, probably late March.

In the meantime, I had some fun with hemispheres.

1. Following up on my graphs of population by latitude and longitude from a few years ago, I got curious about other ways to divvy population besides the usual hemispheres of Northern/Southern and Eastern/Western. The big discovery was the Human Hemisphere, which is the hemisphere (out of all the infinitely many possibilities) that contains the most people. But we can also go one step further and calculate the population of every possible hemisphere — including your hemisphere!

2. The other hemispheric enjoyment was a slightly ironic update to Richard Edes Harrison's iconic "One World, One War" map from 1942. Instead of showing a global war of convoys and transcontinental bombers, my version — "One World, One Market" — shows global capitalism interconnected by ships, railroads, and container ports.

3. I also made some quick maps of the land and water hemispheres for Wikipedia.

Finally, on a notably unhemispheric note, I added a quick graph showing the changing demographics of New Haven since 1790. This has likewise found its way to Wikipedia.