Formed in
2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue
archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of
history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and
has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
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The Peters Projection
Because it is much more easier to work on a 2D surface, map projections convert 3D representations of the earth surface into flat representations. There are three types of map projections: planar, conical and cylindrical. When a projection is centered on one point we call the projection planar (azimuthally). If it is centred on one or more lines of origin we call the map projection cylindrical or conical. Only at the locations where the map is centered, the scale of the map is true. We can for example use the cylindrical map to project the whole world. This map will be centered to the equator. What follows is a map that is quite useful to project the major landmasses in the world, but is not suitable for studying the poles, because these areas are distorted. Map projections can show us a lot of different views of the world. To describe these different views, we use terms like ‘ Equal-area’, ‘conformal’, ‘equidistant’ (Burrough, McDonnell, & Lloyd, 2015, p. 26).
Until May 1973, Arno peters was not a very well known German historian/socialist. He became famous during a press conference in the city of Bonn. It was in Bonn where he unveiled what is also called as ''the greatest single advance in map-making in over 400 years'' (Barney, 2014, p. 103). Peters introduced an equal area projection with a rectification of the latitude lines at the 45th parallel (figure 6). Peters constructed the map in the following way: first thing he did was dividing the surface of the globe into 100 pieces. These longitudinal (3.6o) and latitudinal fields (1.8o) all had equal width and height, then he plotted the equatorial rectangles as squares, and doubled the North-South scale at the equator. After that the higher latitude rectangles were built op (in proportion to the area they represent) (Loxton, 1985). Because of this technique all regions around the equator where stretched and were about twice as long in the direction North-South. Industrialized countries around the 45th parallel had less distortion than countries the less developed countries near the equator. Because of the stretched shape of the projection, the Peter projection is also known as the ‘hanging laundry’’ projection (USCG, 2010). Peters was in fact not the first one who made this map. He was actually replicating an old projection made by Gall in 1885 (Loxton, 1985). According to Peters, the Mercator projection presented a false picture regarding the ratio non-white/white- peopled lands. Peters also claimed that the Mercator projection displayed the so-called ‘Third World’ not fairly. According to Peters, his own projection was a more fair projection of these pore countries, and North America, Europe and Asia were dramatically enlarged in the Mercator projection. The media was sensitive for his story and people where thinking they could make some things right with the “Third World’’ . That is one of the reasons why this new projections was so immense popular after the presentation of Peters (Rosenberg, 2012). As mentioned in the first chapter, all projections have certain distortion (distance, shape, area, or direction). It is simply not possible to project a sphere accurate on a flat surface. So there will always be discussion about what is the right projection.
Figure 6. The Peters Projection (Barney, 2014, p. 104) USCG (2010). Peters projection. Cegis.usgs.gov: http://cegis.usgs.gov/projection/pdf/peters.text.pdf, retrieved September 16, 2015. Burrough, P. A., McDonnell, R. A., & Lloyd, C. D. (2015). Principles of Geographical Information Systems (3rd edition). Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press. Barney, T. (2014). The Peters Projection and the Latitude and Longitude of Recolonization. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 7 (2), 103–126. Loxton, J. (1985). The Peters Phenomenon. The Cartographic Journal, 22 (2), 106-108. Rosenberg, M. (2012). Peters Projection vs. Mercator Projection. Geography.about.com: http://geography.about.com/library/weekly/aa030201a.html, r etrieved September 16, 2015.
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