2020
Mercator. It’s a Flat, Flat World
Category: Innovation (small and large newsrooms)
Country/area: Russia
Organisation: TASS Russian News Agency
Organisation size: Big
Publication date: 22/08/2019
Credit: Authors: DARIA DONINA, TIMUR FEKHRETDINOV Editors: SABINA VAKHITOVA, KRISTINA NEDKOVA Illustrator: ANASTASIA ZOTOVA Art director: ANTON MIZINOV Translator: ANDREI STARKOV Style editor: PHILIP AGHION
Project description:
The interactive digital special project “Mercator. It’s a Flat, Flat World” tells the story of a famous map, published in 1569 by the flemish cartographer Gerhard Mercator. We describe the historical and scientific context of the epoch and share the personal story of its’ creator. The key visual of the project is the map itself. We point at the mistakes, some curious facts and the unconditional advantages of this innovative projection, that glorified Mercator’s name.
Impact reached:
Gerardus Mercator has made a purely innovative map projection which is still used in some fields. A trace of Mercator’s heritage is found even in space research: all images of the Earth taken by the Sentinel-2 and Landsat satellites are shown in his projection. However, we think, it’s important to remind the audience, especially those who eager to rely upon maps while debating about the omnipotence of their countries. In reality Russia is not as big as this popular projection shows us. In reality, Russia is nearly half the size of Africa. Greenland seems to be the same in magnitude as South America, though in actual fact it is only one-eighth of its territory. Canada is only a little bit larger than the United States, yet it looks twice as big. Maps may breed risky delusions. And as we’ve observed, these comparisons of depiction of Russian territories in different projections actually raised discussion among readers. Sometimes it’s useful to doubt.
Techniques/technologies used:
All the pictures were created in Adobe Illustrator and the map as a key visual was collected and processed in QGis. The site itself was built in HTML and Javascript, using Data Visualization Libraries
What was the hardest part of this project?
The hardest part was to digitalize the map correctly. Today only three surviving printed copies of the map are known and are kept in the National Library of France, the Maritime Museum Rotterdam and the Basel University Library. All three sets of sheets are slightly different from one another, quite possibly because time had no mercy on the paper that the map had been printed on. Another tricky point was to translate the text on the map from Latin to Russian.
What can others learn from this project?
The interactive digital special project “Mercator. It’s a Flat, Flat World” tells the story of a famous map, published in 1569 by the flemish cartographer Gerhard Mercator. We describe the historical and scientific context of the epoch and share the personal story of its’ creator. The key visual of the project is the map itself. We point at the mistakes, some curious facts and the unconditional advantages of this innovative projection, that glorified Mercator’s name.
