2010 is over. An interesting year that has seen the advent of a big society in Britain, some exciting sports events (and with retaining the Ashes, even England made a last-minute win), a lot of snow, and many other things to remember (and to forget). This time of the year is review time. In map-ish terms, cartography and maps appear to become more and more popular again, not least because there are so many people out there taking on the new open data that keeps leaking (mostly on purpose, but sometimes by accident…). Therefore, a review of 2010 in maps is inevitable, and James Cheshire did so on his website which is well worth a look (even if that may be a little British-centric): 2010 mapped.

And here comes my final map for 2010: A look at the British view of the world in 2010. To understand how British people perceive the events on the globe, one can look at how frequently a country has been mentioned in major news stories. The following maps do exactly this by visualising the number of news items on the website of the British Newspaper The Guardian (data derived from their Data store). Speaking of the Guardian, their website also features a nice interactive review-creator where you can create a personalised interactive review of this year – try it out if you feel that all other of the plenty reviews out there covered the wrong stories.

Here is the first map that also takes the domestic news stories from the United Kingdom into consideration – for obvious reasons the UK dominates this version of the map:



(click for larger map)



Taking the UK data out (22134 content items), a very revealing global picture becomes visible: News from around the world mean mainly news from the USA (6246 items), a trend which certainly is true not only for the Guardian, but also for many other British news resources. Other Anglo-American affairs, namely (the wars in) Afghanistan (1765) and Iraq (1248) follow next, and only then China’s economic power becomes worth covering (1243 items), still being well ahead of India (727). Far behind are flooded Pakistan (793), crisis shaken Greece (538), or Burma’s controversial elections (153) [of course the topics mentioned here are not the only news topics that were covered]. The following map shows the total news coverage of each of the countries outside the UK using the worldmapper colour scheme (which allows an easy comparison with the land area or the population map):



(click for larger map)

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