Hmm. The ocean is surprisingly prolific.

I'm all for getting people interested in maps, but I really question the effectiveness of cartograms for conveying much information, as opposed to more traditional forms of overlaying information on maps, such as coloring.

For instance, who can tell me, based on the map above, which country publishes more books: France or South Korea? Pakistan or Greece? (And are there really that many books published in Antarctica?)

It's kind of like an early java applet: gee whiz, that looks cool. Form over function.

>Hmm. The ocean is surprisingly prolific. - DAEMON

It's all those squid, with their limitless supply of ink.

I blame a prolonged exposure to Play Doh fumes in their youth.

Agree with #2
It would have better to use coloring to indicate scale and avoid spatial distortion.

Neat! This is the cartographic equivalent of a sensory homunculus, which Cory blogged about here a few years ago: http://www.boingboing.net/2004/12/12/bodies-proportional-.html

Russia and the fact that Europe and Asia are connected constantly screw up these attempts. It's never going to look good when you have to compensate for that much empty space.

Well, that map in particular lends Horace Engdahl's comments about U.S. versus European literature quite a lot of weight. The U.K. alone seems to be publishing as many books as the U.S., with less than a quarter the population. Spain is even more impressive, although I suspect most of the readers are in Latin America.

Which is not to say that Engdahl didn't suffer a severe lapse of tact when making the comments. Nevertheless, he was just stating the facts. Europe does seem to be the centre of the literary world, at least in terms of number of books published.

This is also not to say that U.S. books are in any way bad, just that a greater proportion of good books are likely to come from Europe as a matter of plain statistics.

Good to see Scotland taking up a fair bit of space,
thats prolly just the out put from Cannongate books
http://www.canongate.net/

Ah, this places the Netherlands in its rightful place in the center of the world. Also, I believe it is the only country that has its normal shape.

#8 Kieran O'Neill

I read the article from Associated Press. I agree that Engdahl is a bit blunt.

The article assumes that Engdahl don't read a lot of USAian books, he does. He, or someone else on the board, has propably read most of the authors on Harold Augenbraum's list.

The article claims that not enough American writers get Nobel's literature price. Yet, out of 101 prices, there is 12 winners from U.S. and 6 winners from other parts of America, and no less then 23 who writes in English (quick count by me, may not be exact). The writers of the article has a very anglocentric and US-centric view of the world.

As a countryman I'm ashamed to see that one of the writers of the article is from Sweden.

There has only been four (4!) prices to authors that write in a non-European language and one of them also write in English. Thats worth reporting about.

Is each book only counted once, period, or once for each country it's published in?

In other words, is the latest Stephen King novel counted as just a U.S. publication, or is it counted once as a U.S. publication, once as a U.K. publication, once as a French publication, and so on?

Or am I overthinking? Not that I've got any kind of "USA! USA!" chauvinism, but I'd bet that U.K. publishers (for example) are putting out more editions of books published in the U.S. than the inverse.

Although this is an interesting look at data, I find the shape-correct map with shading proportional to a number (either continuously graded or in increments of color) to be more easily interpreted. In fact there is a more traditional form of cartogram (properly called a cartograph?) that shows the units in their correct shapes AND AREAS, but having each appear vertically "extruded" in proportion to its numbers. This overcomes the misleading nature of coloring a large area with a symbol representing a low number. In this case, Netherlands might appear tall like a skyscraper, whilst Africa would be "flat" but in the correct size and shape. Very intuitive, if commonplace.

It is cool that one can create these proportionate distortions programatically though. Bet you can't say that three times, fast!

>>>"I'm all for getting people interested in maps, but I really question the effectiveness of cartograms for conveying much information, as opposed to more traditional forms of overlaying information on maps, such as coloring."

I respectfully disagree with the above. It all depends on what you are trying to learn from the map. I think there are several applications where you might draw conclusions from maps like this that may not have been apparent from using coloring, etc. Particularly instances where landmass mattered, such as rainfall, crop production, etc. With so much raw data out there these days (can we call it "overload" yet?), it's often tough to see "the big picture". Plus, you can then use coloring as another variable to overlay on the map. I say bravo, mapman! And thanks for the election results - VERY interesting!
-Colby