What makes a map (or three) interesting to me.....

Maps, such as the three posted above, become interesting to me as soon as they begin to provide insights and meaning into places that are important to me.

The Israel Map

For example, above in the first map displayed, I picked a political map of Israel from the Nations Online Project (at nationsonline.org) because I spent the last year studying abroad there and I love being able to look at a map and easily identify and imagine all the locations present on it. Moreover, the map of Israel is fascinating in that it is a symbol of the marriage of geography and political science as the 'mapping' of this small, yet very controversial piece of territory has changed so rapidly over the last hundred years due to various political events. The Israel map provided by Nations Online features a key that explains the various borders (most are still in the process of truly being decided) and transportation forms present in the region, as well as includes Israel's nearest neighbors. It also provides a guide to Israel's different districts and a scale both in kilometers and miles.

The Upside Down World Map

In second grade my teacher explained that people in the Southern Hemisphere look at the map upside down so that their hemisphere is on top. I always thought that was really funny, so the second map I am displaying (again, the second image posted above) what is titled an "Upside Down World Map" drawn from an 'Australia on Top' perspective. The map can be found at mapcenter.com and shows all the oceans and continents and major cities (standard for most world maps) only from a different hemispheric point of view. The map also comes with a handy legend and includes the international date line. I find this map interesting also because it shows that physical geospatial information can be manipulated according to one's perspective or location in the world. Usually we tend to think of the world only from our own perspectives and barely consider how the world is imagined visually in other locations and cultures.


The Male and Female Brain Map

The last map I picked out is actually split into two maps--one of what is supposedly present in a male brain and the other of what is supposedly present in a female brain. This map, which can be found at the website 'darkroastedblend.com' (a culture blog focused on romance), doesn't map out physical locations in the world like the other two maps I discussed. Instead it splits up the two sexes' brains and essentializes them by creating mapped compartments in their brain for stereotypes of what the two sexes supposedly think about on a regular basis such as 'sex' or 'commitment'. I find this map interesting because it highlights the variety of applications maps have in this world. This map demonstrates how humans have learned to map out humor, the body and again their own individual and general perspectives.