GraphJam Side A · Music & pop culture in charts
The Plate Archive13 charts

Maps, States and How America Looks From Elsewhere

The collection with the highest proportion of individually published plates, and the one people still argue with.

Thirteen charts, and proportionally this is the strongest collection in the archive: five of the thirteen earned individual publication as plates, against an archive average closer to one in fourteen. Twenty-seven sites still link to it across thirteen charts is a high rate for a collection this small.

The reason is that a map makes a claim about somewhere real, and people from somewhere real answer back.

The mental-map genre

The dominant form is a map of a place as somebody wrongly imagines it. How Midwesterners see the U.S. is linked from two sites. American Map According to Europeans runs it in reverse. The Japanese population according to the average person. applies it to a country rather than a region, and Index of Global Relevancy to the Average American Citizen drops the map entirely and just ranks the world by how much attention it gets.

These are charts about a viewer, not about a place, and the good ones make that explicit. Contents of Africa according to the rest of the world, published as its own plate linked from four sites, is the clearest case: the subject is the ignorance, and the continent is the evidence. It is the collection’s most-linked chart and the one that most needs its own page rather than a line in a list.

Places with reputations

Californians is linked from four sites, a chart about a population that has a national reputation and knows it. Texas is the terser version. Probable Effects (based on elevation) as caused by y’all, from March 2008, the second-oldest entry in the entire archive, plots a dialect boundary as a topographic function, which is a genuinely inventive thing to do with a map projection.

How often ’eh’ is said, published as its own plate, does the same for a different border and holds three domains. Both of these are linguistic geography drawn as a joke, and both are more precise than the joke needed them to be.

Charts where the map is the punchline

Surface of the Earth, published as a plate linked from four sites, takes a statistic everybody half-remembers about water coverage and plots it so the ratio is unavoidable. Countries Destroyed is a world map with an empty category, a two-item legend counting the nations destroyed by the Large Hadron Collider, drawn four days after the accident that shut the machine down for a year. Popular colors of residential submarines is a chart about a housing stock that does not exist, and the deadpan is carried entirely by the word “residential”.

American and European Culture is the only entry here that attempts a comparison rather than a caricature, and its image was not recovered, which means the archive’s single balanced map chart survives as a title.

Why these are worth republishing individually

A chart about a country is the kind of thing that gets linked from inside that country, in a language the original author did not write in. That is visible in the links for this collection: they are more geographically spread than anywhere else in the archive.

It is also why every one of these addresses matters. A map chart’s link profile is built over years by people who found it in their own language, and a redirect to a general index would break every one of those arrivals.

Charts here
13
Images recovered
9
Published as plates
5
Referring domains
27
First posted
Mar 2008
Last posted
Oct 2010

The charts

In publication order. Sides run in tens, the way a record does. A chart marked as a plate has its own page and its own retrospective; the rest are published here, at the addresses they held when they were posted.

  1. A1

    Probable Effects (based on elevation) as caused by y’all

    · image not recovered

  2. A2

    Texas

    · Drawn by Ben B · image not recovered

  3. A3

    Californians

    · 4 domains still link here · published as a plate

  4. A4

    Contents of Africa according to the rest of the world

    · Drawn by arbitraryuser · 4 domains still link here · published as a plate

  5. A5

    Index of Global Relevancy to the Average American Citizen

    · Drawn by Laura C

  6. A6

    Countries Destroyed

    · Drawn by s. dubbs · 3 domains still link here · published as a plate

  7. A7

    How often ‘eh’ is said

    · Drawn by takedown1 · 3 domains still link here · published as a plate

  8. A9

    How Midwesterners see the U.S.

    · Drawn by euphgeek · 2 domains still link here

  9. A10

    The Japanese population according to the average person.

    · Drawn by whimsyy · image not recovered

  10. Side B
  11. B1

    American and European Culture

    · image not recovered

  12. B2

    Surface of the Earth

    · Drawn by alexandre_santoro · 4 domains still link here · published as a plate

  13. B3

    American Map According to Europeans

Queries answered

Why are five of thirteen entries published as their own plates?

Because a map earns links at an unusually high rate, two links per chart here, behind only the politics and life-online collections. A map chart makes a claim about a real place, and people who live in that place respond, which is what produced the links.

What is the most-linked map chart?

Four of them hold three or four links each: Californians, Contents of Africa according to the rest of the world, Countries Destroyed, and Surface of the Earth. All four are published individually as plates.

Are any of these charts offensive?

Some are deliberately about prejudice rather than geography. Contents of Africa according to the rest of the world plots an outsider’s ignorance of a continent, and its subject is the ignorance. That distinction is what the chart depends on and it is stated on its own page.

Is there a chart of how Europeans see America?

American Map According to Europeans, from October 2010, one of the last charts in the whole archive. A companion piece, How Midwesterners see the U.S., runs the same joke from inside the country and is linked from two sites.

Why do some entries have no image?

The original images were hosted on a service that now returns an error, so each was recovered from a surviving copy. Where no copy survived, the entry keeps its title, date and address.