In this highly covered American presidential campaign season, people from both sides of the political spectrum tend to wonder how others are receiving much different information about candidates, American political issues, and perceptions of the world at large. This is especially apparent in the discussion of climate change and energy development. Cookies on internet browsers and sites enable users to isolate themselves in articles, people, and advertisements amenable to their prior beliefs and ethics.

Google has a neat map that allows people to combat this polarization of news stories at http://www.newsmap.jp. Here, Google displays the most clicked and searched stories of the day, meaning both Fox News and MSNBC stories appear on the website. Updates occur automatically every ten minutes. The default setting shows the most popular stories from the United States, but this can be altered to show stories specific to various European countries, Australia, India, Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, Brasil, and Argentina. Users may customize the stories they see by unchecking or checking news categories: World News, National News, Business, Technology, Entertainment, and Health.

Newsmap not only shows the main articles read by Google users of a country, the website shows the amount of related articles to the trending articles. Instead of seeing a bazillion articles on basically the same topic trending on your Facebook feed, Newsmap offers a more balanced and diverse range of notable topics for the moment.

This a great tool for geographers because it enables spatial analysis of news on the national scale, and shows the propensity of different countries towards scientific and environmental news. Geographers then know what the general population thinks or knows about a topic, enabling more effective education to occur surrounding climate change and human-environment interactions.

Enjoy perusing the diverse news from around the world!

The Center for Global Development, a think tank based in Washington, DC, maintains an online resource titled “Mapping the Impacts of Climate Change.” This interactive tool allows you to customize a map in order to learn more about how global anthropogenic climate change will affect our planet.

The categories on the left-hand side of the map allow the user to change the specific climate change effect being displayed: extreme weather, sea level rise, agricultural productivity loss, and overall effects. On the map, the darkest red color represents the worst impacts, while yellow represents the least impacts. On the left-hand side of the map, the user can “zoom in” on a certain region of the world by selecting its name from the list. At any point, the user can roll over the countries on the map to view its overall ranking in terms of climate impact when compared to other countries. A total of 233 countries were included in this ranking.

Above: The map displaying overall direct risk as a result of climate change shows China is at the greatest risk, out of all countries.

One fantastic feature of this map database is its division between “direct risks” and “overall vulnerability.” If you click on “direct risks” under “Extreme Weather” on the left-hand side of the map, you will see that Australia and Canada are at a relatively high risk of extreme weather in the coming decades. However, if you flip the map to “overall vulnerability” under “Extreme Weather,” Australia and Canada are shown to have only a moderate risk of extreme weather impacts. The ability of this map and analysis to reflect each country’s ability to successfully adapt to the challenges that climate change will pose is impressive, and a very useful tool for the geographer.

Above: Zooming in to Central Africa on the map of overall vulnerability to agricultural productivity loss reveals that Somalia will be at the greatest risk in this category, out of all countries in the region.

This map does have an issue in terms of scale, however. While the user can zoom in to specific regions of the world, the map scale is not sufficient enough to view small island developing states and other tiny countries. These small, low-lying coastal and/or island nations will be among the first to feel the impacts of climate change, especially when it comes to sea level rise. This map could be improved through a re-analysis of scale and how that affects country representation.

The “Mapping the Impacts of Climate Change” resource can be found here: http://www.cgdev.org/page/mapping-impacts-climate-change

An expansion of The Atlantic magazine, CityLab is a news site that focuses on urban planning and metro areas around the world.  Designed for people who are “creating the cities of the future,” CityLab includes a section dedicated to displaying maps of worldly conflicts and interesting developments.

Clink of the “Maps” tab at the top of the site, peruse the map thumbnails, and explore dozens of stories covering a wide assortment of subjects, including politics, health, history, industry, environmental sciences, and more.

Maps are extremely important visual aids when paired with a news story. Often, maps can more quickly and efficiently present material than an article, so creating a good map is critical for CityLab.  This website is really great at looking at different sets of data and seeing the very different ways to display them.

Depending on the topic, a mapmaker can choose to use a choropleth map, dot map, heat map, etc to show information as accurately as possible.  I challenge you to closely examine a map when you click on it to analyze the cartographer’s choices and think how or why they made them – what do the colors symbolize?  Where are the trends in the map? What are the “silences” or the map, or where was something left out?

Have fun browsing the great maps of CityLab!
http://www.citylab.com/posts/maps/