Worldmapper

Worldmapper is a free archive of cartograms — world maps in which every territory is stretched or shrunk according to a chosen statistic rather than its physical size. On a Worldmapper population map India and China swell enormously while Russia, Canada and Australia shrink to slivers; on a map of tropical rainforest, Brazil and Indonesia dominate a world where most of Europe has nearly vanished.

The collection runs to several hundred maps grouped into themes including population, health, education, food and agriculture, energy, pollution, transport, conflict, economics, and a well-used set on climate and emissions. Each map is published with a short written explanation of what the variable is, where the data came from, and which patterns are worth noticing, so the map is a lesson rather than just a picture.

What makes it a strong teaching resource is that it makes an abstract idea concrete. Telling a student that carbon emissions are unevenly distributed rarely lands; showing a world map where a handful of countries have ballooned and an entire continent has almost disappeared lands immediately and provokes questions. Because the map projection itself is doing the argument, students also get a natural introduction to how map design shapes perception — a genuinely useful media-literacy lesson.

The project began with researchers at the University of Sheffield and is now maintained in collaboration with the University of Oxford, and the maps are regularly updated with new datasets. Maps are free to view and download, and are released under a Creative Commons licence permitting non-commercial educational use with attribution.

It suits geography, world history, environmental science, economics and data-literacy work from roughly middle school upward, and individual maps make excellent discussion starters or notebook pages. Browse more from Worldmapper.