Do you know of a map projection that visualizes global interconnectivity?

[arnav]

Hello!

I'm a student-researcher who's trying to discover if there are alternative cartographic projections that better help communicate global interconnectivity.

My interest is due to the recent n-coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan and mainland China. Some of us feel that geographical maps don't properly convey the interconnectivity of metropolitan hubs.

The number of international travelers has nearly doubled over the last decade. In a map that accurately represents this reality, a person living in New York or Toronto is closer to Beijing than to the American Midwest.

What map projection techniques would help visualize global interconnectivity?

Thanks!
Arnav

[Jaxilon]

I'd think something like airline heat maps would be pretty close to what you are talking about. Along the lines of this: https://www.aviation24.be/miscellane...ation-heatmap/

You would then need to think about the numbers that move from there via more localized traffic. If you got enough details you could remap the globe and pinpoint the safest places to live in the event of an epidemic. Of course, it only takes one infected to break it all down.

[Redrobes]

Yes, I think maps are spatial representations of information but what you are looking for is a representation for vector quantities. I don't think any change of projection would help as it is a fundamental property of a projection that it maintains the spatial relationships between the areas (although some projections have discontinuities).

If you have a property of a location that is a simple quantity (or scalar) then you can sometimes find maps that warp the sizes of areas of a map to inflate or reduce the area by that scalar quantity. For example there have been maps based on income where Africa is much reduced in size.

But if you have values associated with areas that relate to the ability of that place to connect with all other places then you need to represent the travel times instead of the map areas. I have seen a map which warps the world according to how long it takes you to travel from that one specific location to all other areas. So you could do that as a map for just Beijing but to do that kind of map for all places to all other places would be impossible as the travel time from Beijing to New York is different from Beijing to the mid west even though you might start out by taking the same initial flight to get to the US.

I think it would be easier to keep the projection standard and color the map based on how long it takes you to get to every other point on the map from one specific starting point. So from just Beijing you can then color New York in a different color to the mid west so that getting to the rural edges of China would probably take longer than getting to New York. So a travel heat map is a good way to do it. That heat map might be color based or done with contours of time taken which would look very cool.

Here is one for the commute time in london:

https://www.timeout.com/london/blog/...here-in-london