What’s the purpose of this website? In short, it is designed to present an overview of the global situation and the currently observable trends. I focus on questions like: How is the world population progressing? Or: How is poverty distributed on this planet? Or: How does the environment evolve? And so on.
So our goal is not to produce very detailed in-depth studies, but to cover as many topics as possible, provided we do have the necessary data, of course. The most data I got from the CD-ROM of the Fischer Weltalmanach 2019 (German), which has appeared for the last time and is no longer available. And I have many data from online: The Human Development Report , the World Bank, the federal statistical office (Germany), the American website „AtlasBig“ (focusing on agriculture), and Wikipedia.
My most important tool are world maps, that transfer data into images. This is done using a computer program, that I wrote. To produce a map just takes a few seconds.
Why didn’t I just use a program, that is available? Because what is offered on the market I don’t find very convincing, and to adapt a program to my specific needs is way too complicated. By the time struggling through a handbook I have written the program myself much faster and more efficient.
The program is written in Excel VBA. For some complicated routines I found some very helpful tutorials at Youtube. I have used other languages but VBA has two enormous advantages. So I can outsource the whole data management to Excel tables. And excel offers macro programming, which means, I can just execute some operations and study the code and simply manipulate it for my own purposes.
Among professional programmers VBA is not very appreciated, and in fact it is not very good for programs that are used by customers or colleagues. But for own use it is perfect. You don’t have to build in complicated routines to discover and avoid user errors. You know your own programs very well and if really an error occurs it should easily be discovered and repaired by using the debug mode. My experience: After testing the program errors occur for one reason only: Data mismatches.
What is special about my maps? I avoid all showmanship, the maps are simple and designed to be studied in peace. That’s why I don’t constantly change colours, but use a consistent color scale from blue to red, and avoid too fine nuances.
The data can be scaled by fixed or flexible threshholds. Whenever possible I use my standard scaling: quintiles, that are calculated by the program, and are adapted by an algorithm so that the middle quintile always oscilates around the
average.
The basis worldmap I use is considerably simplified, the purpose of the map is to display geographical patterns of distribution, nothing else. So you will miss quite a lot of small islands and countries, and borderconflicts are ignored.
Some producers of thematic maps go one step further, replacing complicated border lines by polygones, that only roughly resemble the real outline. I had to make a decision: polygones or freehand drawings? I preferred freehand forms because the countries are easier to be recognized, and I could do without labeling.
I want to emphasize that I’m deeply convinced that digital mapping is just in its early stages, the potential is huge. But What you can find on the net so far are static single maps, but the geographic analysis lives from map comparison. The software I developed therefore contains some tools for this purpose. I will speak later in detail on this subject, which interests me very much.