Map #1: This map obviously looks kind of different because what we are used to seeing on the left side of the map is actually on the right (North America, South America, Greenland) making it look like North and South America is in the east and the rest of the world is in the west. The website I got this from didn't reference this map but if I were to guess I'd say it might come from Australia since Australia is in the very center, looking a little bigger than it normally looks on world maps. Another change about this map is that everything kind of looks squished together, for example Alaska looks like its just a hop, a skip, and a jump away from Russia.
Map #2 below is kind of hard so see but it was digitally made up to show the different dialects of America based on vowel sounds. It breaks up the U.S into different sections and uses certain symbols to show what their mouths are doing when they speak. I've studied this kind of thing in my sociolinguistics class, and the truth is you can't really make a map that shows the definite dialects of different parts of the U.S because people move constantly, people can have all sorts of accents based on where they are from regardless on where they live, and everyone has a different opinion on which areas speak a certain way. Plus, accents can change in the same state so you can't really group states together and say "these people in this part of the country make these types of sounds, and these people in this other part of the country make these other sounds." You can generalize, but still the accuracy of this map is not too believable for me.
This map was made at the University of Pennsylvania in order to teach linguistics.
I liked the first map, it really does put a different perspective. In a similar way, there is an upside down map, which maintains the Americas on the left side, yet flips everything about the equator. The landmass sizes are, of course, unchanged, yet the whole image is very different. As Americans, or at least in my case, I have always had such strong focus on the USA that its size becomes magnified, when, really, so many countries south of the equator are huge. Literally, giants. Our perspectives are just that I guess, perspective.
ReplyDeletePoint of clarification, Alaska and Russia _are_ that close; there's nothing really wrong with the scale of the first map. There's also not a deliberate attempt to distort in the second example, and there's nothing I see here that addresses the second part of the prompt.
ReplyDeleteWelp...thats embarrassing.
ReplyDeleteNobody else should comment on this blog because apparently I suck and did everything completely and totally wrong.
thank you