I’m an absolute sucker for maps. I love that they tell you as much about the society that created them as the places they are describing. Reading them can be like investigating a mystery, trying to unravel the clues.

I came across this map created by Paul Butler, a Facebook intern via the excellent Information Aesthetics blog.

Facebook Map of Connections

Paul talks about how it was created on the Facebook Engineering pages.

It’s a beautiful image, one that raises quite a lot of questions and I was thinking back to my days as a trainee teacher and how I might have used this.

  • If you showed this to a group of students without telling them what it was (and hiding the Facebook logo) what would they say that it showed? Can they make out the coastlines, borders or other features? What do the lines signify?
  • What are the dark areas of the map?
  • Compare it to other images (even better if you can overlay them using transparency on a whiteboard)
    • Satellite image of the world – is there a link between the colours on this image and the bright areas on the other map?
    • Satellite image showing the Earth at night – what are the similarities, what about the differences?
    • Are the light and dark areas there for physical reasons and/or human ones? Does a dark area correspond to a low population? What about coastal China?
  • If they know it shows Facebook connections, what does it tell them about the “online” world versus the “real” world? Or does it tell us little about the world and quite a lot about Facebook?

I’m sure there are lots more questions you could come up with…