Why Google Maps gets Africa wrong | World news | The Guardian
►https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/02/google-maps-gets-africa-wrong
About halfway through Jonathan Swift’s boisterously witty epic poem On Poetry: A Rhapsody, the 18th century Anglo-Irish satirist briefly turns his attention to maps of Africa, writing:
So geographers, in Afric maps,
With savage pictures fill their gaps,
And o’er uninhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns.
In Swift’s time, European explorers had only skirted around the coastal edges of Africa and its interior remained, to all intents and purposes, a mystery. But as the poet pointed out, rather than just leave the middle of the continent blank, mapmakers would instead “fill their gaps” with things they thought might reside in such exotic corners of the world, such as strange monkeys, roaming lions, and “elephants for want of towns.”
–—
Mapping Africa: can you help us fill in the gaps? | World news | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/04/mapping-africa-can-you-help-us-fill-in-the-gaps
▻https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/4/4/1396607631211/7f2380c1-0496-4285-aec2-81f053aebcab-620x372.png?w=1200&h=630&q=55&auto=fo
We have come along way from the European explorers who used exotic animals to “fill in the gaps” when they were drawing maps of Africa. We have the technology, more resources and better data, maps are no longer the purview of colonial conquerors.
Google Maps, the world leaders in cartography, say they are on the “never-ending quest for the perfect map” but are they also guilty of selling African short? Over the past few years they have vastly increased their coverage of the continent but have they gone far enough?
#cartographie #afrique #manipulation #visualisation #représentation