Hacklog: Blogamundo — poking holes in the language barrier since approximately 1 month from now

There’s an interesting website called Worldmapper which bills itself as : “The world as you’ve never seen it before.” They have a collection of maps called “cartograms” that are scaled in clever ways in order to express complex global data.

So for instance, you can see at a glance that there are a lot of elderly people in India or that Brazil is a popular destination for refugees.

The maps can be a little challenging to read when countries become highly distorted (just which Scandinavian country is that giant lavender blob?), but even so, it’s a very useful view on data that’s inherently complex anyway.

I wish there were maps like this that dealt with linguistic topics. Mapping language is a pretty challenging task, but I’m intrigued that the Worldmapper software has been released by its creator, Michael Gastner.

There’s really a whole field here waiting to be explored, and I bet that there is already work being done (links welcome!). Some data is starting to trickle in — the now (sadly) defunct NITLE Weblog Census was an consequential early effort, and recently there was an interesting conversation around some language data collected by Technorati.

Ethan Zuckerman has an interesting metric that looks at the distribution of languages in Wikipedia that measures “the number of wikipedia articles per million native speakers of the language (WA/MS) for languages with over 30 million speakers. ”

It would be fascinating to see all this sort of data charted onto a geographical map — Iceland would eat Greenland for lunch, for starters. I have a couple of hunches of my own that I’d like to test out.

But being bridge-of-nose-deep in hacking on Blogamundo of late (news soon), I don’t really have time to take a stab at the required data munging and so forth right now, but, ya know, some day.