Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Map of the Week - Heavy Metal Cartogram

DJ Yuletide from Melting Point Radio (WRMC-Middlebury College) presents this heavy metal cartogram. It is based on the number of bands registered on Encyclopedia Metallum. While obviously the bigger countries have more bands, the per capita metal leader was Finland with 2300 bands. Bands like Diarrhea Vomit and Life is My Enemy.


Questions arise such as:
Why is so much of the area of the USA taken up by Alaska? -
Do they really have more bands there than the rest of the country
or is it the "mediocre" Mapresso cartogram applet?
Does Greenland represent Denmark or Greenland?
Are all Europeans metal crazed freaks?
What are those 3 islands floating down near Antarctica? -
Or are they just there to look creepy?

5 comments:

Michael5000 said...

I'd like to see the per capita map. I bet it would be all, like, Finland, Sweden, and then everybody else.

It is sad to see that Africa still lags so far behind in the production of Heavy Metal bands.

I'm pretty sure those islands down by Antarctica ARE Antarctica. The question is why they aren't all tiny, like the African countries. This map would have us believe that Antarctica has as many heavy metal bands as all of North America. I don't care how many amateur guitarists that have at McMurdo Station, that just can't be right.

SandraBee said...

I guess if there's Jell-o wrestling, why not H.Metal?? Probably the Finnish station, perhaps. If I were down there I'd be rockin out too.

mhwitt said...

You know, at a glance, I thought this map was about heavy metal in a non-musical sense. You know: mercury levels, lead poisoning.

New Zealand seems to have just the right number of Heavy Metal bands to be rendered at just the right shape and size.

Yuletide said...

This is an old post, but just wanted to add that this is a suuuper rough alpha cartogram with tons of issues, a few of which have already been mentioned here. It's partly a limitation of the data, as it was used in this map (bands per country, not per state), and partly of this particular cartogram generator, which swells up alaska to compensate for the USA's high band/surface area ratio. Not sure what is going on in Antarctica, might just be normal size cause there's no data? But I plan to someday make a better version of this map. But before that, a more traditional web map of all the metal bands in the world. Coming soon...

Dug said...

Love the map even with its flaws. We're looking forward to the next one!