GeoGarage : Lies, damned lies and maps
▻http://blog.geogarage.com/2014/08/lies-damned-lies-and-maps.html
Signalé par @freakonometrics sur Twitter
Cartography helps set the parameters within which debates over policy and strategy unfold.
We mathematicians often stand accused of skullduggery, but we’ve got nothing on cartographers. Mark Twain jested that there were lies, damned lies, and statistics.
An old book from the 1950s instructs readers How to Lie with Statistics.
So fraught is the situation that University of Wisconsin math professor Jordan Ellenberg wrote an entire book — and a laugh-out-loud funny one at that — to debunk faulty mathematical thinking and the misadventures to which it gives rise.
Such are the consequences of our dark art.
But if numbers inform — and sometimes misinform — think about maps.
A map or nautical chart is a picture.
It’s a visual medium that conveys lots of seemingly factual information at a glance. One vignette. Europeans, and Europeanists, fret constantly that the United States must turn its back on Europe to pivot to Asia. You have to blame the Mercator map of the world for such claims. If Washington, D.C. is America’s geopolitical pivot point, and if we assume U.S. leaders can only gaze in one direction, then pivoting to the Far East does indeed mean doing an about-face.
#cartographie #visualisation #manipulation #propagande #projection