[artinfo] Drawing the map of the world stored in our collective conscience

[Douwe Osinga]

I have always been fascinated by maps. Maps are not only a
picture of the world, they also picture out mind. Let somebody
draw a map of the world and you'll get a map of her/his world.
That's why Europe is in the middle of a European map, China in
the middle of a Chinese map and the US is in the middle of a
map from the United States.

I have designed a little weblet that lets visitors collectively
draw a world map. The map is drawn in yellow (land) and blue
(sea). One small block, however is red. Visitors are then
requested to decide whether this small block should be land
or sea for the map to look like the world.

By filtering visitors based on their ip numbers, different
maps can be drawn, giving a picture of how people from different
regions think the world look like. But that's someway off. For
now you can help the project by visiting:

http://douweosinga.com/projects/mindworld

As you can imagine, it takes quite some clicks for a world map
to appear, so if you like the project and have a website, please
consider putting up a link.

Douwe Osinga
http://douweosinga.com