Visualizing the Global Digital Divide By Mapping Internet And Population

Posted on . 7 comments.

With this map I tried to visualize the global digital divide. It shows more than 80,000 populated places in blue and about 350,000 locations of IP addresses in red. White dots indicate places where many people live and many IP addresses are available.

The IP address locations are taken from the GeoLiteCity database by MaxMind. The database of populated places is taken from geonames.org. The visual style is largely inspired by Eric Fischer's wonderful Flickr-vs-Twitter maps.

Also, here you can find a high resolution version and the separate layers for population and internet addresses.

What do you think?

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Comments

  1. Pete   December 7th, 2011

    I dont understand the coloring - do you mean white dots are where blue and red dots overlap?

  2. Puya   December 7th, 2011

    Great Job!

    An even more interesting map would be one showing internet connection density. IP-adresses divided by population.

    Best,
    P.

  3. cnawan   December 7th, 2011

    Great, now add global cellphone penetration (5 billion). For extra points include CD-ROMs carried by donkeys into deepest Mongolia.

    Cory Doctorow of Boingboing.net reckons the internet reaches basically everywhere, just some areas are _really_ slow.

  4. Simon Morris   December 7th, 2011

    Wow, great job.

    The Hi-Res version might just find a place on my office wall :-)

  5. Gregor Aisch   December 7th, 2011

    Fortunately, most of those people with "some form of colorblindness" are Dichromats, which basically means that they still can read colors as long it's not green. I checked this map using colorblindness simulations and found that it's possible to distinguish colors. If you had trouble reading the map yourself, it would be helpful if you name your kind of colorblindness and describe what you see. Thanks.

  6. A Mitchell   December 7th, 2011

    100% dependency on the use of color to transmit essential information makes this map absolutely unreadable by the 10% of American men with some form of colorblindness.

  1. A desigualdade de acesso à internet | Vislumbres sobre Visualidade says:
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