Misleading maps
Drawing a map so that projection, color, scale, or symbol makes a claim about size, threat, or ownership that the territory does not support.
A map is trusted the way a photograph is: it looks like a record of the world rather than a drawing of it. But every map chooses a projection that enlarges some places, a color scheme that makes some places alarming, and a set of symbols whose size is the cartographer's. A country shown as a red mass spreading toward the viewer's border is an argument; so is a map of an election by land area, in which empty counties outvote cities, or an arrow that makes a trade route look like an invasion.
German geopolitical mapping of the 1930s turned the device into a school, and Cold War magazines kept it: the Soviet Union, enlarged by Mercator and colored red, loomed over a small pink America for forty years. Exploits Framing Effect and Availability Heuristic.
Historical examples
The geopolitics school around Karl Haushofer produced "suggestive maps" for schools and the press: Germany as a small space ringed by arrows, Czechoslovakia as a dagger pointing at its heart, the lost territories in black. Mark Monmonier's chapter on the maps shows how projection, symbol, and omission did the argument's work without a sentence of text.
Monmonier, Mark. How to Lie with Maps. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018, ch. 7; Herb, Guntram Henrik. Under the Map of Germany: Nationalism and Propaganda 1918–1945. London: Routledge, 1997.
Cold War news magazines mapped the Soviet Union on the Mercator projection, which more than doubles its apparent area, in red, often with arrows or a spreading shadow reaching toward Europe and the Pacific. Time's covers of the late 1940s set the pattern, and the "red menace" map became the standard picture of the threat for forty years.
Monmonier, Mark. How to Lie with Maps. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018; Barney, Timothy. Mapping the Cold War: Cartography and the Framing of America's International Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
The county-level election map, almost entirely red by land area, was reproduced by the president-elect's supporters as proof of a landslide; the popular vote had gone the other way by nearly three million. Cartograms scaling counties by population show a map roughly half blue, which is the same data drawn by people rather than acres.
Field, Kenneth. "Election map 2016: the many ways to see it." Cartographic Perspectives, 2017; Monmonier, Mark. How to Lie with Maps, 3rd ed., ch. 12.
Find a map in a news story about a conflict or an election. What does the color choice say, and what would the same data look like drawn by population rather than by area?
In the wild
Short examples of the technique at work, each with what to notice. The same examples are questions in the quiz, where the answer is not given away.
A pamphlet maps "the enemy's reach" as a dark stain spreading from its borders across a Mercator world, with the reader's country small in the corner.
What to notice. Projection and color make the claim; the stain measures nothing, and Mercator doubled the enemy.
A party publishes a map of the country colored by which side won each district, and calls the result "the whole nation."
What to notice. The map counts acres, not people. Empty land outvotes the cities in the picture.
A tourism board's map draws a disputed region inside its own borders, in its own color, with no marking.
What to notice. The map presents a claim as a fact of geography; the dispute is left off the drawing.
Sources
- Monmonier, Mark. How to Lie with Maps. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. ISBN 978-0226435923
- Herb, Guntram Henrik. Under the Map of Germany: Nationalism and Propaganda 1918–1945. London: Routledge, 1997. ISBN 978-0415127493
- Barney, Timothy. Mapping the Cold War: Cartography and the Framing of America's International Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. ISBN 978-1469618548