Granularity of maps
Toying with Facebook apps this week-end, I ran across the “where I’ve been” application; the one that allows you to store the countries you have visited. Here’s a screenshot of the world map:
What’s interesting is the level of granularity the map depicts: as one can see, every nations are represented (well almost, islands such as Mauritius are not) but it’s funny to not that North America (USA+Canada) have a finer-grained representation given that states and province are showed.
Although I am not surprised by that, especially when you consider the audience of FB (mostly North America) as well as who designed it, this sort of depiction is interesting. It definitely shows a sort of spectrum that goes from a “precise/fine grained” end (NA) to a “imprecise/unknown” end (with countries not represented as well as no differentiation of big countries). A bit culture centric, this map would be very interesting to discuss with people from local culture. Of course, I know it’s not the biggest feature in FB (and the same comments can be done on other web apps) but that’s curious noting.
I would have have found curious some sort of user-generated map representations. For example, something such as the fool’s world map:
October 8th, 2007 at 11:11 am
- Culture centric but with Europe standing in the middle of the map…
- For many US citizens travelling to some other US federal state is already “going abroad”
October 8th, 2007 at 11:56 am
Actually the “where I’ve been” also includes Canadian provinces and United Kingdom regions, so this is not just a case of US-centrism.
When I stumbled upon this application I was quite pleased to discover that increased granularity. For big states, whether federal or unitarian with large identifiable separate cultures, representing internal boundaries makes a lot of sense. Even if the EU some day becomes something closer to a state, it will still make sense to represent internal boundaries. In many states, people identify closely with their home region. Take India for example : some Indian states are entirely different nations from a cultural point of view. And there are many states like that !
October 8th, 2007 at 4:35 pm
@joss: definitely agreed for the first point (there must be some feaure that put your country/region in the middle of the map)
@jean-marc: yes, that’s what I described in my post: canadian province are included.
We can also wonder about what would be the proper level of granularity, and towards whom this matters.
October 9th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
Indeed, and for that (determining granularity and audiance) the question that should be tackled is : what practices does this app support ?
I can see primarily two : first, discovering Facebook and playing around with the plateform and the apps, second, showing off. In both cases granularity does not matter much : it’s barely a communication, there is no proper receiver…
One practice I could see it supporting would be socializing (see article by Alex Iskold) : we both went to California… how does this give us something to discuss ? Well if you went to San Diego for a conférence on Biotech, this California thing is not much of a shared experience. In this respect, the context in which some country was visited is information of equal value that the information of the location. Granularity should extend to non-geographical data.
And finally one could expect some zooming features : one should be able to recreate a more precise trace of where one went. If after this conference you went to San Francisco or had a week-end at lake Taho, we then might have something in common…