Are our Maps afraid of the dark?
When you look at a map, do you ever stop to think what time of day it is in that place? Say you look at Google Earth during your lunch break and visit the other side of the world; it’s probably night time there but in the digital world it’s always sunny. You never really know what the world’s like at night.
Maps are our representation of the world but if we’re consistently missing out the nighttime half of our existence, can we claim to be providing an accurate view of the world? In this blog I will explore what impact the choices cartographers make are having on our understanding of the world. My aim is to convince you to challenge the mainstream default we’ve come to expect.
Nighttime is not daytime.
Let’s start with a pretty obvious observation. Daytime is not nighttime. For many of us, our lived experience is a well lit one. We look up into the sky and see the sun, or peer through some clouds and make out the edges of a dim yellow disc. In Britain we know when it’s daytime because the street lights are off. Once the sun recedes past the horizon, and tiredness sets in, we go to bed. The circadian rhythm of waking and sleeping is a core part of the human experience.
This rhythm affects how we think about the world too. Daytime is all about action and movement. Nighttime is rest and unconsciousness. When you think about “what happens at night”, we often think “ah…not much”.
BUT THERE’S SO MUCH GOING ON.
- Buildings exhale all around you, letting out the heat they’ve taken in during the day and slowly contracting back to a cooler state.
- Plants burn through oxygen, making sugars and carbohydrates to fuel their growth.
- Wildlife comes out to play: think foxes, owls, Aye Ayes, jerboas, bats and many, many more.
- Millions of people are awake and doing things with their lights on.
- Power plants keep on burning fossil fuels.
When most of the maps we see are of daytime, that reinforces our view that everything happens in the day, and not much happens at night. Our choice to show daytime maps as the default is a ‘political’ act; it supports one theory of the world to the detriment of another. When maps are meant to be informing us about what’s happening in the world right now, maybe we should think again about the version of the world we’re projecting.
We also need to consider how human behaviour can change under the cover of darkness. Imagine a ship alone at night taking fish from waters it shouldn’t be in. Or a convoy cutting it’s way through a forest on an illegal logging operation. Displaying the data of these nighttime activities on a ‘daytime’ basemap could make you think these phenomena only happen during the day. Omitting the nighttime removes some fundamental context that could mean the difference between catching someone or not.
We can capture different data at nighttime.
As I noted above, different things happen at night. One thing in particular — people staying awake and turning their lights on — is a phenomenon that’s increasingly being used to generate knowledge about human development.
Organisations like the World Bank are releasing maps of nighttime lights. With these maps researchers are investigating things like urban growth: if over time, a patch of light gets bigger and brighter, that’s a pretty good proxy for a settlement expanding. You can start looking at poverty too: with increasing amounts of income (money or fuel), you can afford to have your lights on for longer, and you can also buy brighter lights too. All of that leaves a trace that’s picked up by satellites hovering over us at night.
As for the animals that come out at night, we can track them using a range of sensors. We profiled Bats in London last year on the blog; they use acoustic sensors to track the number of bats in the Queen Elizabeth Park. (Note the developers of the map used a daytime basemap to present their data, even though it’s looking at nocturnal activity). Across the world’s protected areas there are extensive networks of camera traps, and pictures at night are helping researchers understand animal behaviour.
The sleeping Earth is a wondrous Earth.
Finally, I think we should be using nighttime maps more because, well dammit isn’t the nighttime beautiful and magical? Especially that connection with the stars and the universe that all of us feel. We gaze up at the stars when we sit around campfires, we cajole our children to sleep by shining moons and stars around their rooms, and we fawn over Brian Cox talking about the Big Bang.
We tried to emulate that with the Planet Pulse page on Resource Watch. Drawing inspiration from Carl Sagan’s famous speech about the Earth as a Pale Blue dot, we designed this page to do more than just show data. The ability to zoom in on our Earth is meant to inspire, intrigue and build that connection between all of the 7.5 billion friends that share this planet with us.
That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives… there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known. Carl Sagan
Why not listen to Carl talking about the Pale Blue dot while you look at Planet Pulse?
We’re starting to see the night in some of the basemaps offered by mapping platforms, like Carto’s Dark Matter and Mapbox Dark options. And there’s a huge benefit to these magical and beautiful basemaps, because when you start generating a sense of awe in your viewer, their state of mind starts to shift. When looking at your site, they perceive time more slowly, feel less impatient, and are more socially minded and charitable. (See this paper for more information on that study.) Especially if you’re trying to help people change the world for the better, that can be pretty important for generating the impacts you desire
SO… welcome the darkness.
As a lifelong emo, writing “welcome the darkness” as the conclusion to a blog post has been a dream of mine for nearly 13 years. But I want to challenge the world’s carotgraphers and map designers to think more carefully about the basemaps they use before they stick with the default. The “sleeping Earth” is a much forgotten perspective on the life of our planet, but one that can provide unique insight into the functioning and status of our planet.
There’s also a unique cultural and emotive aspect to nighttime maps, which could change how your viewer ‘feels’ the data. Bringing in those elements through a darker, night-sensitive basemap are the kinds of details that can hold a viewer’s attention, draw their focus, and put them in the mental state to learn and remember facts.
Maps that purport to provide an accurate picture of what’s happening in the world right now, or want to help people learn more about our shared Planet, could deliver so much more insight and excitement if they captured the unique view that you can only get at night.
