These are revolutionary times for maps.
They're being transformed
by 21st century technology.
In the past, it could take
hundreds of years to make a map.
Now, photo-real digital images
can be made in hours
and updated every week
to create a virtual world of maps.
They seem to present a completely
accurate, objective image of the world.
The triumphant culmination of
thousands of years of map-making.
But from the Christian vision
of the Middle Ages…
to the elaborate
symbolism of the Aztecs…
and from the Victorian obsession
with statistics…
to n*zi propaganda…
history reveals that maps
are shaped by the beliefs,
rituals and prejudices
of the people who make them.
Maps have always done more than
just accurately represent the world.
And that's what really
excites me about them.
They are unique windows
onto past ages,
full of passions and anxieties
of the people that made them.
And if we scratch beneath their surface,
we begin to understand how
different cultures, different societies
have used those maps…
to define their faith,
to understand their environment,
to impose order and structure
on their teeming, chaotic worlds.
The 9th of October, 1943.
Allied bombers above Hanover
destroy much of the city,
including state archives.
In the basement was one of the world's
most precious medieval treasures,
the Ebsdorf map.
The Nazis had just ordered
its removal to safety,
but it was too late.
This rare insight into the medieval mind
was lost in the rubble.
The Ebsdorf map was made
at the end of the 13th century
by the nuns of Ebsdorf Abbey
in northern Germany.
Most medieval maps in Europe
were made by religious orders.
They were the intellectual elite
and they also had the resources
to create these wonderful works of art.
Fortunately, the nuns had photographs
of the original Ebsdorf map.
So after the w*r,
they were able to make a magnificent
copy of their lost treasure.
Wow.
I have been looking at reproductions
in books of this map for years.
But to actually see it here,
what, ten foot tall,
is absolutely breathtaking.
It's a spectacular map.
It's not really a map
as we understand it
in modern terms.
It's a kind of vast encyclopedia
of everything that was known
to 13th century Europeans.
It's totally unrecognizable to us
as we look at it now.
But if you start to dig a bit deeper,
it starts to make some kind of sense.
This is a map of three continents.
Asia sits at the top,
that entire top half of the map.
Africa is right over here,
running right down from here.
There is Africa right down the coast.
And tucked in here in the bottom
left hand corner is Europa.
There's Anglia, England, down here.
But this is also a map of what is
unknown to the 13th century mind.
Looking again at the edges of the map,
you start to see
these rather monstrous figures.
Gog and Magog,
these two fearful creatures,
cannibals, monstrous figures,
eating human flesh.
Also on the margins, the Massagets,
children who eat their parents.
And if you go back over to this side,
into Africa, again, the limits of the map,
more monstrous races.
Starts with animals,
griffin-like figures,
snakes, strange half-human,
half-animal creatures here.
Figures with no eyes, with no heads,
creatures with no arms,
and it becomes
more and more monstrous
as you run up the African coast.
But there are also more familiar
local features on the map.
Northern Germany is shown
with its rivers and its towns,
and the Ebsdorf Abbey is
clearly marked too.
The map comes from and was created
here in Ebsdorf, and it belongs here.
It's ours, and it's something
we're very proud of.
What are your favourite images
on the map?
I particularly love
the representation of paradise,
right next to the head of Jesus Christ.
It is an enchanting depiction.
Adam and Eve have both got an apple.
That is a sign for equal rights.
And a snake winds down.
The snake is fantastic,
because it's not a feminine snake,
but a masculine one with a beard.
In the 13th century,
the majority of people were illiterate.
They had to rely on pictures.
I think our map used to be
of great importance
to communicate to people,
and to confirm ideas.
The Ebsdorf map
is a magnificent display of knowledge.
It was used by the nuns
as a spiritual guide to present
the Christian vision of the world.
This is clearly not about geography
in the modern sense of the term.
This is a map about faith.
And if you look at the centre of the map,
all its locations are biblical ones.
You can see Galilee here.
You have Bethlehem
with its little star there.
You can see Noah's Ark up here,
something there.
You can see the Tower
of Babel rising up there.
It's telling a very specific story
about the Christian faith
and its forms of belief.
And right at the centre of the map
is Jerusalem.
It's at the absolute heart of the map,
and within its walled city,
an image of the resurrected Christ.
This is an image that puts Christianity
right at the heart
of the entire known world.
But there's also a hidden message
lying at the heart of this map.
The viewer is being asked
to think beyond earthly delight
and think about heaven.
Think about the next world
that they're heading to.
And you can see this
in the whole sweep of the map.
At the top, the head of Christ.
To the right and the left,
his hands.
And at the bottom,
his little feet poking out.
This is a world defined by Christ.
Christ is the world.
And he's embracing it
in a big theological bear hug.
Medieval Christian maps weren't
really about defining territory.
They weren't really even interested
in getting from A to B.
Their interest was getting people
to focus on a higher spiritual realm.
On rising up above the earth
and reaching up to heaven.
Two hundred years later,
the ancient Aztecs
were also using maps
to convey information
about their own rituals and beliefs.
They give us a rare insight
into one of the great empires
of Central America.
One of their maps is part of a book
called the Codex Mendoza,
which describes Aztec life and rituals.
It was created by an Aztec artist
in the 1540s.
At first sight,
it doesn't look like a map at all.
To westernize, this image
is almost completely alien.
But that's because the Aztecs had
a very different
conception of space to us.
This is in fact a city map.
It shows the Aztec capital
of Tenochtitlan
on the current site of Mexico City.
The city was built on a vast swamp,
and you can see the canals
which run in this big blue X
right through its center.
And also up here, you can see
the main temple to the gods.
But down here, there's also
a rather chilling reminder
of the Aztecs' obsession
with blood sacrifice.
This is a skull rack,
and sure enough,
there is the skull
of a defeated enemy.
The map is full of symbolic information
about Aztec society.
The eagle sitting
on a cactus on the rock
is a reference to the city's
foundation myth.
It was said that the gods had sent
the eagle to mark the spot
where the Aztecs were
to build their capital.
It remains
the national symbol of Mexico.
Beneath the eagle is a shield with
seven feathers and a bundle of spears,
which symbolize the authority
of the Aztec lords.
And beneath the city
are triumphal images
of two Aztec military victories.
But by the time this map was made,
the Aztec empire had been conquered
and colonized by the Spanish.
The map was commissioned by
the Spanish governor, Antonio Mendoza,
as a gift for the king of Spain.
Aztec artists were employed
to create the map
to show off the king's
new territories and subjects.
So what were the native artists
trying to tell him?
The key to understanding this map
lies in these male figures
all across the city.
And what they represent
is its rulers, its elders.
And this incredibly important
figure down here is the priest ruler.
You can tell it's him
because he's larger than everybody else.
He's also painted
in black body paint.
But surrounding him
are these other male figures
who represent the rulers
of particular zones
or neighborhoods of the city.
Because this is a map about hierarchy.
It's about a deeply structured society
which wants to map its city
around these kind of issues
rather than where the canals run
or how the streets cut across the city.
Because that's the nature
of Aztec society.
Top down, deeply structured,
utterly hierarchical.
The native artists who drew this map
were making a record of
the glories of the old Aztec empire.
It's a defiant celebration of its power
structures, its rituals and its beliefs.
The map is a record of a mighty empire
conquered by the Spaniards.
But it's also a really poignant image
of everything that the Aztecs had lost.
While the Aztecs
were drawing symbolic images
commemorating their own lost empire,
Europeans were making
ever more accurate maps
to help them understand
their newly conquered territories.
And maps were starting to look
more like the ones we use
to navigate the world today.
But even as they became more accurate,
they were still revealing the beliefs
and prejudices of the age.
The British were increasingly curious
about the inhabitants
of Britain's far-flung dominions.
And in the 19th century,
maps were a popular source
of information.
Some of London's most fashionable maps
were made by a prolific cartographer
called James Wilde.
Wilde specialised in world atlases.
And in 1815,
he made this elaborate map,
which he called a chart of the world,
showing the religion, population
and civilisation of each country.
It was an ambitious attempt to catalogue
all the available statistics
about the population of the world.
Wilde even used a colour code
to show the dominant religions
in each part of the world.
Protestantism was green.
Catholicism was red.
Jews were black.
Atheism was brown.
And idolatry
was a rather sickly yellow.
In the key to Wilde's map,
he describes all the different
religious denominations,
Christians, Muslims.
And then he gets into some rather
wonderful descriptions of idolatry,
which he says is absence,
faint or sincere, of religion
which is apparently 153 million people.
He also has atheism,
which he describes
as a state of absolute ignorance.
And there are apparently 30 million people
who subscribe to that belief.
And you can see this being reproduced
across the surface of the map.
And down here in the South Seas,
you get lovely descriptions of Fijians.
Cannibals.
Down in New Zealand, cannibals.
Cannibals.
More cannibals.
And yet more cannibals.
In the Atlantic Ocean,
a tribe called the Jagas
and their chief worship consists
in frequent sacrifices of human victims,
particularly children.
Wilde's map was made at a time
when Britain's imperial forces were
spreading through India, Sri Lanka
and Southern Africa.
He used his map to satisfy his readers'
curiosity and confirm their worst fears
about these unfamiliar native peoples.
There's even a scale to show
how civilised each nation is,
which is in Roman numerals
from one to five.
One is absolutely uncivilised
and five is very civilised.
No surprise,
England gets top marks, gets a five.
So does France.
But you look across the rest of the map
and, sadly,
the Hare Indians up in Canada
only score a miserable one,
as do the Copper Indians.
And so, sadly,
do the cannibals
down in the South Seas
only coming in
with a miserable one.
Wilde's map was an attempt
to reassure his readers that
Britain and the British
were at the pinnacle of civilisation.
It's really an expression of British
fears, prejudices, but also anxieties
about how to govern
non-Christian alien peoples
that were now coming into
the sway of the empire.
In 19th century Britain,
the drive to gather statistics about
the rapidly rising population at home
was also gathering pace and efficiency.
And maps were becoming powerful tools
that could be used to identify
social problems
and even save lives.
In 1831,
a mapmaker came to the rescue
when thousands of people
across the country
suddenly started dying.
The death of a mysterious disease.
Maybe you'd wake up
and there would be
10% of your neighbours
would be dead.
And that would be horrific
when you didn't have any idea
what was going on.
And it meant that a lot of people
would just move,
would just pack up their stuff
and leave
to try and get away from this
very, very quick death.
Victims writhed in agony,
their muscles continuously spasming.
Once infected,
they could die within hours.
Nobody knew what was causing
the spread of the disease
or how it could be stopped.
Once the outbreak had ended,
over 32,000 people
had lost their lives.
And they called it the Blue Death.
It was Britain's first cholera epidemic.
As it swept across the country,
an apprentice surgeon
called John Snow
was struggling to save the lives
of infected patients.
Snow felt helpless as he watched
victim after victim die.
But he was already beginning
to develop an idea
about what was causing
the deadly disease.
The scientists at the time were baffled.
Most of them thought that
the disease was spread
by a miasma of infected air.
But John Snow believed
that it was caused by
tiny microorganisms
invisible to the eye.
And he suspected that the sewers
were contaminating the drinking water
and spreading the disease.
When another cholera epidemic hit Britain,
Snow examined water samples
from the drinking supply
of a cluster of victims in south London.
He found they were all contaminated
by raw sewage.
This was the breakthrough.
In 1849
he published an outline of his theory
to explain the transmission
of the disease.
But nobody took him seriously.
Why didn't Snow manage
to persuade people of his theory?
Everyone believed that
diseases were spread through bad air.
And this was so strongly believed.
It was a bit like,
I guess you can compare it
to Darwin's theory of evolution.
It was so radical,
so ahead of its time,
that people just struggled to see
and believe that this was true.
To prove his theory and convince people
to take him seriously,
the doctor turned into a mapmaker.
When cholera broke out again
here in Soho,
Snow seized the opportunity
to prove his theories once and for all.
He walked around marking the deaths
on a street map, house by house.
And sure enough,
a pattern quickly emerged.
He realised that people
who were drinking from the water pump
on Broad Street were dying.
Snow's map plotted
the deadly progress of the epidemic.
And the cluster of deaths
around the water pump
seemed to confirm his theory.
He was so excited
by this extraordinary breakthrough
that he rushed into a meeting
with the parish guardians
and demanded that they immediately
take the handle off the water pump
to stop the local residents
from k*lling themselves.
The parish guardians were unconvinced
by the vital connection
revealed by Snow's map.
But after the deaths of 600 people
in the parish,
they were prepared to try anything.
The handle of the pump was removed.
How do you think that
Snow exploits the power of the map?
It was definitely almost a PR technique
of getting information,
of getting a theory across.
And we still use that very much today
in terms of talking to policymakers,
talking to people
about what's going on
and showing them it visually on a map
is a very nice way, a very friendly,
perhaps unthreatening way of
getting something
that's quite scientific across.
Thanks to John Snow's pioneering work,
maps are now a powerful weapon
in the battle against disease.
So what kind of things are
epidemiologists looking at today?
It's very similar to the entire history
of public health mapping.
It's whatever is the biggest
public concern at the time.
So in Snow's time
cholera was the big issue.
And now we're working on the things
which are in the news of public interest.
And with lots of public health studies
looking around for climate change,
one of them would be
looking at malaria
and how malaria may spread
if the climate changes,
as some predictions suggest,
would it come back into Europe,
for instance.
As the industrial cities of Britain
expanded,
wealthy Victorians felt threatened
by the ever-growing ranks of the poor.
Maps became tools for understanding
poverty as well as disease.
How did the Victorians view
poverty in this period?
They viewed it, I suppose,
as one of the most major
problems of the time.
The poverty question, what do we do
with the masses of urban poor
that had
arrived and settled in the city
during the previous
decades of the century.
That was seen
as a major concern for people.
The poverty question
inspired a wealthy industrialist
to create one of the most sophisticated
mapping projects of the Victorian age.
His name was Charles Booth.
Booth was inspired to act
when he heard the claim that
were living in poverty.
Booth was sceptical,
but he was also curious.
He decided to fund a team of researchers
to do a thorough assessment of
levels of poverty throughout the city.
All the information would be
carefully charted
in a series of street maps.
The project would continue
for 17 years.
Charles Booth was an unlikely man
to try and map London's poverty.
He'd made a vast fortune in animal skins
on the docks of Liverpool.
But the tanneries
were terrified by his visits
as he probed and catalogued
every inch of his thriving empire.
And it was a habit that would
stay with him for the rest of his life.
Booth's hunger for statistics
was fed by a team of investigators.
From hundreds of interviews
and observations,
his team created
a series of colour-coded maps
that showed the income levels and social
classes of every street in London.
This is one of Booth's maps
and it shows Limehouse,
one of the poorest districts
in London at the time.
The yellow on Booth's maps
denoted wealthy areas,
pink and red were the middle classes,
blue and black were the poorest.
And there's absolutely no yellow
on this map whatsoever.
Booth often joined his researchers
as they spread out
through the streets of London,
gathering information on wages,
working conditions
and what Booth called
social and moral influences.
This wouldn't be just a map.
It would be an intimate
social profile of the city.
Booth even lived
with some of the families himself
and he recorded his feelings
in his notebooks.
He wrote about those living
just above the poverty line, that
the children have when young
less chance of surviving
than those of the rich,
but I certainly think
their lives are happier.
They are more likely to suffer
from spoiling than harshness,
for they are made much of being
commonly the pride of their mother
and the delight
of their father's heart.
One interesting aspect of
Booth's work is that prior to Booth,
poverty was seen
very much as a morality problem
and one of the things
that he showed was
that poverty was not
so much a problem of drunkenness
or unwillingness to work.
That was a very, very small part.
He saw poverty
as being a complex problem
and needed to be therefore addressed
through a whole variety
of sources of information.
Booth's researchers
scoured these streets
making decisions about
how they colour-coded the streets.
The kind of information that
they were feeding back into the maps
were contained in these
extraordinary notebooks
where they wrote down
every encounter in every single street
and they make for fascinating reading
to discover not only
who they were encountering
and what they were seeing,
but how that fed back into the maps.
Here's one entry.
It says, Reach Street, Jamaica Place
and Gill Street are a nest of brothels
frequented by common seamen
of every nationality.
Another, this is a noted
thieves' resort at Nightingale Lane.
I knocked at the door of Number 13,
Jamaica Street.
They were a man and a wife
and they kept an opium den.
So what is it
that Booth's maps reveal?
For me, what is interesting is that
it reveals that poverty
is spread out throughout the city.
So you have pockets of poverty
very, very close to areas of
great prosperity.
It's showing that
even if you were living
in the West End of London,
for example,
you weren't that far away
from situations of severe poverty.
Poverty is just specks of black
and dark blue
within a sea of much warmer colours
of relative prosperity.
This is something that we can manage,
that we can get to grips with,
that we can handle.
Booth's extraordinary project
provided graphic evidence
that helped prompt
housing legislation
to improve living conditions
in Victorian Britain.
It also fuelled a campaign
to introduce an old-age pension
to alleviate poverty.
Booth's maps revealed that
more than a third of all Londoners
were living in poverty,
an awful statistic.
But somehow,
by putting the problem on a map,
Booth made it more manageable.
It seemed less terrifying.
And his maps also
convinced Victorian society
that something had to be done
to help the poor.
In the 20th century,
statistical mapping was firmly established
as a powerful tool of government.
In 1940,
these ordinary American citizens
had no idea they were being watched.
Over 4,000 miles away,
someone was counting them
and plotting them on a statistical map.
And this was the result.
A map of America,
seemingly rather innocuous,
with neat little pie charts
showing the percentage of
European immigrants in each state.
And the countries down here
that they came from.
This is also a classified map.
It says up here in the corner,
for official eyes only.
This was a map
that was made by the Nazis.
The map was part of a secret mission
to flood America with n*zi propaganda.
By 1940,
Hitler had already invaded
much of Europe.
Britain was next on the list.
The British were desperately
trying to persuade the Americans
to join the w*r against n*zi Germany.
But President Roosevelt
was reluctant to act.
There is no demand for sending
an American expeditionary force
outside our own border.
There is no intention
by any member of your government
to send such a force.
You can therefore nail
any talk about sending armies to Europe
as deliberate untruth.
The Nazis were determined to bolster
Roosevelt's resolve to remain neutral.
And they were leaving nothing to chance.
Using statistics
from the latest American census,
they were drawing up a map that
pinpointed the biggest communities of
German immigrants
living in the United States.
The large red segments
in these little pie charts
identified the best targets
for propaganda.
The map revealed that the Nazis
should focus their efforts
in the rural communities of Missouri,
Wisconsin, Nebraska and Texas.
This was where public opinion
could be most easily manipulated
to oppose
American intervention in Europe.
In 1940, this dry statistical map
was actually a weapon of w*r.
Maps were incredibly powerful objects.
They touched the mind,
but they also touched the soul.
They magically conjure up places
that we've never even seen.
And it's that power which leads them
to being exploited or even perverted.
The Nazis were masters
of mass manipulation.
But they weren't just using statistical
maps as weapons of propaganda.
In occupied Europe,
they were also using them
as tools of terror.
This is a map of Slovakia
from the Second World w*r,
showing the population figures
for the local towns and villages.
But this is also a really sinister map
because the Z's marked here
show Roman Egyptian communities
and the black dots here,
here, here and here
show the local Jewish population.
The maps were drawn up in 1941
by a n*zi expert in ethnography.
The Nazis passed them on to the president
of the Slovakian puppet government,
Josef Tiso.
Under the Nazis,
Tiso had already introduced
anti-Semitic legislation
to prevent Jews
from holding public jobs,
attending schools or earning property.
Now he was under pressure
to go further.
For the Nazis, these maps were
blueprints for subsequent policy.
They allowed them at a glance
to look at the dots and see
where the Jewish communities lived
in this area.
And just a year later,
in March 1942,
they started rounding them up
from the towns and villages here.
The Slovakian Jews
were sent to their deaths
in the concentration camps.
Within six months, 58,000 men,
women and children had been taken.
This neat statistical map of Slovakia
was being used to drive
the so-called Final Solution.
In the hands of the Nazis,
maps had become tools for genocide.
After the Second World w*r,
revelations about n*zi atrocities
and the ideological tensions
of the Cold w*r
created a generation
suspicious of government.
The authority of maps
also came under scrutiny.
In May 1973,
a German historian called Arno Peters
confronted the map-making establishment.
He denounced the most famous
map of the world
and said it was distorted
by political and cultural prejudice.
This is the map that generations of
school kids have grown up with.
It's the famous Mercator projection.
But Peters shocked the world
when he announced that this map
was quite simply wrong.
He pointed out that Mercator was
distorting the size of countries
in an attempt to retain their shape.
As a result,
Europe looks far more prominent,
whereas the developing countries
are being downplayed.
If we look at Africa and Greenland,
they look about the same size.
But Africa is actually 14 times bigger.
Peters condemned this map
as being imperialist and r*cist.
Peters was no cartographer,
but he thought he had the solution.
Taking account of the relative
size of each country,
he came up with a new formula
for representing the globe on a map.
And he called it the Peters projection.
Peters claimed his map showed
the true size of countries
for the first time ever.
He dramatically reduced
the size of Europe,
whilst expanding the size of Africa,
elongating South America.
And it's still something of a shock
to look at this map
and see how large these two continents
loom on the Peters projection.
Peters regarded himself
as a champion of what he called
the non-white peoples.
And he saw this map
as part of a wider project
to right the wrongs that he saw
as being perpetrated
against those people
living in the developing world.
Arno Peters invited nearly 300 members
of the international press
to the unveiling of his new world map.
The media embraced it with enthusiasm,
but professional cartographers
were furious at what they saw
as the cheek of this outsider.
They called the map deceptive,
absurd, illogical.
They were clearly, really
annoyed at what they saw
as an untrained cartographer
trying to map the world,
and they accused Peters of making
a map that was full of errors.
The reaction was very disappointing
for Arno Peters.
It was in sharp contrast to the great
enthusiasm of the international press.
The map-making establishment
saw it as a fundamental
criticism of their profession.
Peters was disappointed, even shocked.
But he stayed optimistic and said,
this map will prevail
because it will succeed
internationally.
And the Peters projection did become
an international mapping phenomenon.
Anyone who wanted to display
their liberal credentials
pulled down their macators
and proudly replaced them
with the Peters projection.
It was championed by Oxfam,
the United Nations
and the Catholic Church,
and it sold more than
But the Peters projection did have
distortions of its own.
Despite all the success and adulation,
the critics did have a point.
The Peters projection was flawed,
and it wasn't even accurate
on its own terms.
Peters had made
some basic miscalculations,
which meant that countries like Chad and
Nigeria were twice their actual length.
Did Peters ever accept that
there were inaccuracies on the map?
He was certainly prepared
to accept mistakes.
But no argument convinced him,
because everything had been calculated.
Every point had
even been recalculated
to a specific formula
developed by experts.
He kept on checking,
and no mistakes were found.
Arno Peters was attacking other maps
for being biased,
yet he was blind to the fact that
the Peters projection was
just as distorted
by his own political assumptions.
But the Peters projection
did do something quite extraordinary.
It finally exploded the myth that maps
can ever be 100% accurate, scientific,
objective representations of the world.
It showed that maps always have
social and political agendas.
Arno Peters not only transformed
the way we look at the world,
he also changed the way
we look at maps.
There is no such thing
as a neutral map,
and you're kidding yourself if you think
you're a neutral cartographer.
Since the 1970s, radical mapmakers
have been building
on Arno Peters' legacy,
deliberately using maps to promote
alternative views of the world.
If you think
the Peters projection was strange,
what about these maps?
These images are so distorted
that you can hardly tell that
they represent the outlines of countries.
They look more like
peculiar pieces of abstract art,
but they represent
a very special kind of map,
and it's a map with an urgent and
very powerful political agenda.
These images are part of the
World Mapper Project,
launched in 2005.
They use statistics
compiled by the United Nations
to redraw the map of the world.
These images draw attention
to some of the greatest problems
facing humanity
in developing countries.
This map shows HIV infection
across the globe.
Tragically, Africa
dominates the entire map.
India and Southeast Asia
are also large,
Europe reduced very small up there.
This one shows refugee destinations,
and the shape changes again.
This time, places like Sri Lanka
become massively distorted,
as does South America,
and rather interestingly,
so does the Middle East.
Here, teenage pregnancies.
India now is the most
dominant figure
with the highest number of
teenage pregnancies,
in contrast to Japan,
which is only a speck
with the lowest rates.
And finally, this map,
infant mortality rates.
Again, India and Southeast Asia
loom large,
but the map is once again
dominated by Africa,
with the largest number of babies
dying under the age of one
in the entire world.
What was your aim
in making these maps?
What were you trying to do?
I thought
that now we had all this information
about almost everybody in the world,
it should be made
much more widely available.
And by available, I mean not just
the numbers being available,
but the actual picture of what it was
showing being made available,
so that people around the world could see
what was being counted about them,
what was known about their lives,
and then
you could decide for yourself
what you felt about it
and what you wanted to do about it.
And that's the power of the map,
isn't it?
I mean, I'm fascinated
by how you see that importance,
that the map does something
that text can't do.
What is it that the map can give us?
What does the map give us?
The map taps into a whole part
of our brain and our imaginations
which text doesn't do.
It's like looking at a face
or looking at a picture.
You first of all see
the kind of eye line of the map
and it taps into
different emotions.
I mean,
you can't take your ratio of numbers
and become that concerned about it,
but when you see a picture,
it appears to be real.
It's very different.
These maps with their swollen
and shrunken countries
are a dramatic call to action.
They take a mountain of statistics
which are usually so easy to ignore
and provide shocking clarity,
a profound understanding
of the most pressing problems
that face our world today.
The World Mapper Project
captures the spirit of the digital age.
Globally aware, visually sophisticated
and technically innovative.
And when it comes to navigating
our way around the planet,
today's photo-real online maps
from companies like
Microsoft and Google
can take us anywhere in the world
at the click of a mouse.
From their corporate playground
here in Zurich,
Google Earth routinely sends out cars
with mounted cameras to map our roads.
Cameras on tricycles
to get into heritage sites
and aerial teams
to capture the big picture.
These images are combined
with satellite photographs
and then wrapped around
a 3D model of the Earth
to create an instantly accessible
virtual world.
It's the technology
that only a few years ago
would have been impossible
outside of defence departments
or, you know, the CIA.
And now you have access
to that information.
And you can fly around the world
with very high rates of frame update,
ie, it looks very smooth.
And there's a massive amount of
very clever technology
going on behind the scenes.
You can explore as if you were
flying over the Alps
in a jet fighter from your home,
and that's amazing.
Google Earth has been downloaded
by over half a billion people worldwide,
and it's no surprise,
because there's something
incredibly exhilarating about seeing
our planet suspended there in space,
hurtling down through the layers
and coming to rest in your own street,
which is what most people do
when they usually log on
to Google Earth.
And this is Oxford.
This is where I live.
That's my own street,
and that's where I get my coffee
in the morning.
This is a miniature version of the Earth
at our fingertips.
The world now seems open
and accessible to all.
Digital maps produced
by online companies all over the world
are helping to redefine the relationships
between global corporations,
national governments
and individual citizens.
One of the things that surprised us
was how quickly
Google Earth became a tool
for people, individuals, organisations
to communicate their idea,
whatever they had a concern over.
In the Amazon, there was a tribe
that we got to know
who had, for many years,
avoided civilisation.
So they didn't have a culture of
writing reports or creating maps,
but nevertheless they were in an area
that was under environmental pressure
from logging and so on.
Because they could recognise their
local area from images,
they were able to use
Google Earth as a tool
to delineate their tribal areas
and then use that information
then to fight their case.
Maps have also been used
to mobilise international public opinion.
In places like Darfur, I mean,
the mapping has taken on
even more political resonance,
hasn't it?
Yeah, so a few years ago,
when the atrocities
were happening in Darfur,
we worked with an organisation
in the United States
to actually show people pictures of
villages that had been burned.
You could actually see the circles
that were the people's huts
that had been burned.
And that had a huge, human impact.
For hundreds of years,
maps have been used
to do so much more
than help us navigate
around the globe.
From the spiritual meditations
of the medieval Catholic Church
to Victorian anxieties about
civilisation, poverty and disease.
Maps have been used
to help us carve up,
manipulate and make
sense of the world.
Digital maps are now being used
in the same way.
They feed our hunger
for instant information
and define our fears
for the future of the world
in the 21st century.
Human beings have been making
maps of one sort or another
ever since we first walked the earth.
And what I've always loved
about them is the fact that
they define our world
rather than simply reflecting it.
And they'll continue to shape
who we are
and what we do as humans,
whatever our future.
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