35 Maps That Offer A Completely Unconventional Look At The World

Bored Panda reached out to the subreddit’s founder Patrick to find out how Reddit's cartography powerhouse has been doing since we last spoke a while ago. He describes himself as “a Denver-based techno-geek with a focus on all things geospatial and cartographic and a coding hobbyist with an emphasis in geospatial applications.”

“The subreddit has been stable the last few months, however, that all changed this morning with the news out of Ukraine of the military action there,” he said. “The subreddit usually has between 2,000 and 4,000 users at a given moment on a normal day. That number spiked to a peak of over 20,000 users looking for current maps of the situation there.”

Patrick believes that the way people think of cartography is changing. “The previous generation was accustomed to paper maps that they used to navigate. This required skills in orientation and awareness that are no longer necessary with digital maps on mobile devices. Whilst there are lots of articles that eulogize the loss of these skills, I don't think it's necessarily all bad.”

According to Patrick, the history of cartography is full of changes in how maps are created and used. And right now, “we're seeing another shift in response to the digital age.” The sub’s founder explained that “the digital generation has a heightened awareness of how maps can visualize data. The tools to make maps have been democratized. This has increased interest in finding new and clever ways to see spatial data.”

“I think the hottest trends are in maps that elucidate some sort of political understanding. These can be maps of elections, voting districts, gerrymandering, political recognition, voting patterns, etc. Social media is engineered to spur controversy and this is most apparent in hot button political topics. Politically themed content will garner more discussion, controversy and comments than most other topics.”

Patrick is a member of #maptime Denver, Rocky Mountain Map Society, NACIS, PLSC, Charles Close Society and Open Street Map Foundation. So he always has a new project up his sleeve. Right now he’s working on building a plugin for QGIS, an open-source map-making software.

“The topic is map projection distortion. We all know that flat maps distort the shape of the Earth. However, visualizing this is quite difficult. My plugin will work so that a user can input a projection and a given region. The output will be a map overlay that shows where the scale is closest to true and where it falls below a given threshold,” he told us and added that he’ll be happy to share it when it's finished.

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