What You Get When 30 People Draw a World Map From Memory - Uri Friedman - The Atlantic
▻http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/01/what-you-get-when-30-people-draw-a-world-map-from-memory/282901
Maps, as I’ve written before, are inherently subjective—no matter how detailed or scientific, they reflect our worldview and the age in which we’re living, not to mention the difficulty of projecting a spherical globe onto a plane surface. Now compound these challenges by asking 30 people to sketch a map of the world from memory. What would you get?
In the summer of 2012, Zak Ziebell, now a 17-year-old high school senior in San Antonio, did just that. Tasked with creating “a piece of art that would reveal something unseen” as part of a pre-college fine arts program, Ziebell approached 29 strangers on the University of Michigan’s campus, handed them a pen and half a sheet of paper, and asked them, on the spot, to draw a map of the world. Ziebell, who recently posted his findings to Reddit, then completed the task himself and digitally merged the 30 maps into one image, overlaying the composite drawing with satellite data. Here’s how Ziebell described the process to me:
