World Map Observations by Nami

In the earlier week of Academic EnglishⅡ class, Professor Tan made us draw the world map twice. After we drew the first map, we briefly looked at the others and discussed about the differences, then drew the second one. We all drew totally differently at the second time although we had the same time limit with the first time, one minute. There seemed to be reasons for this fact and some interesting observations about what we drew. I would like to discuss about it here.

The reason why we drew it differently is because we had gotten the ideas from the map of others drew. We shared our geographical knowledge, so the second time, some added continents or islands they forgot to draw on the first and some added name of places to make it more detailed. Thus, we made our second maps better than the first ones.

I wondered why our second maps are so different from each other's. For the first time, it is pretty easy to notice why. Each of us has different level of knowledge of the world map. Some have almost perfect image of the world map in their head but others, like me, picture it unclearly. This difference of intellect between us students caused the variety of the first world map. Then why second? Why is it still pretty different even though each of us took the additional information to make own map better? There are, in my opinion, two reasons for this. One is that our class is so global. Second reason is our individual sense of the world is different from each other.

First, because we did not come from a same country nor do we have same educational back grounds. We come from diverse countries such as China, Korea, Singapore, the Philippines and others, so therefore we are educated differently. Each country has their own way to educate kids. We tend to draw our own country as a center of the map. We always see the map which has our country at the middle and think this is the normal, common and standard map in the world. There is no right or wrong answer for this so we did not change which country to put on the middle.

And secondly, I would say this is because each one of us has our own different taste. Most of us drew world map in Equirectangular Projection which the shape of map is rectangle. But there are some other projections such as Mollweide projection or Conic Projection.  I saw couple of our class mates draw maps in one of those projections; that is circular shape and not rectangle. It was pretty surprising and interesting to see and this fact made me observe that the difference between us is not only because the first reason, our diverse home countries. The drawing skills are also different individually. The image, you have in your head, maybe cannot be showed up by your drawing skill. Thus, our varieties of sense of art made our map look so different. 

So those two reasons that I observed show you our tastes and sense are different not only by country to country but also by person to person. It cannot be changed by getting the information or knowledge from others but the background or experience you had does.

Nami Ikeda