My GeoPolitical Memberships

Comments

5 responses to “My GeoPolitical Memberships”

1. Bill

   15/09/2009

   Hmmm… this is very cool. My guesses:

   ? (presume a neighborhood/ward/parish of London)
   Borough of Islington (?)
   Metropolitan London
   England
   UK
   EU (? doesn’t seem right, Sweden not in EU…)
   Western Europe (?)
   Commonwealth
   NATO
   G20

   You skipped out on UN and OECD

2. Dan Zambonini

   15/09/2009

   Oh, I’m very impressed, particularly with your identification of The Borough Of Islington. And yes, the first one is indeed a neighbourhood: Highbury.

   Correct again with the European Union (Sweden apparently entered in 1995: http://europa.eu/abc/european_countries/eu_members/sweden/index_en.htm).

   The seventh one (just “Europe”, the continent) has debatable boundaries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe) and is more of a geographic classification than geopolitical. But is seemed pretty.

   I hadn’t even considered OECD; good suggestion.

3. Bill

   15/09/2009

   Was lucky really on the Borough, I have a map in my house that shows London by borough so the shape looked familiar. A quick google image search of “ward map of islington” led me to the Lib Dems website… their map split Highbury in two… see: http://islington-libdems.org.uk/pages/wardindex.html

   Didn’t know Sweden was in the EU, I guess they’re EU but eurozone… Pretty dumb of me not to realize it was all of Europe and not just western Europe… I have an excuse, I’m an American, we’re lousy at geography 🙂

4. Jake

   16/09/2009

   Very neat idea. How did you make it?

5. Dan Zambonini

   16/09/2009

   Hi Jake. They were fairly easy to make (with the right software package). I just did a search on Google Images for the right map, and opened this with Adobe Fireworks (Photoshop or Illustrator would have been just as good, I suppose a free package like GIMP would too). I then used the ‘Magic Wand’ selector tool to highlight the relevant area (sometimes then using the ‘Select > Select Similar’ option, if the map had multiple parts of the same colour, for example), and then finally ‘Select > Convert Marquee to Path’, which would give me a lovely vector area of my map (I could then delete the actual bitmap map underneath).