tissot’s indicatrix

Even including a nod to the West Wing “Big Block of Cheese Day” episode that introduced most of us the Gall-Peters projection that right-sizes Europe and reduces polar flair, the Guardian reports that some Boston schools are dropping maps that have perpetuated this alternative geography for the past five centuries. Developed by a German historian in 1974 after researching a novel equal-area map from a nineteenth century Scottish catographer, some distortion is unavoidable (here is another non-traditional approach) when translating a three-dimensional globe to a flat visualisations but depicts landmasses by their relative size and hopefully eliminates some of the implicit bias of the West, reinforced by the industry-standard Mercator projection.