Project Overview
This Mapping the Overlooked project was created by Amina Lampkin, Quinn Morris, Flo Ning, and myself.
I strongly suggest you check out this webpage created for our project before continuing.
Our group had a tough time selecting a topic. We had so many ideas but did not know which one would be the most unique, creative, and relate to sustainability. Once we decided on language as the basis, we ran into additional problems as to how we would create a project around it. There are so many aspects of languages and the role they play in today’s society, that we felt like we would be limiting our message and effect by making one map that had to focus on sustainability. Therefore, we made three. One maps the age and origination of languages, another one maps the number of people that speak the languages, and the last one maps the perception of languages in the amount of power they have. Each one focuses on the ten most spoken languages in the world today.
The Roles
For this project, everyone helped create a survey to collect data for our Power Map. We advertised it so that we could get a desired 100 responses. We all contributed to the topic, as it consists of many elements, not focusing on one specific area. After figuring out how we would go about the rest of the project, Quinn was tasked with all the research, and Flo and Amina both analyzed the data and crunched it to then create the three maps. I put the final products together by making the GIF of the three maps and the project webpage.
The Maps
About the Maps
The three maps are placed on top of one another in the GIF in order to show that they are connected and related to one another. The GIF provides a visual that is an easy tool for to compare the results of our data. It was important for us to display our maps in this way to create a user-friendly perspective for observers, which Donald Norman emphasizes in his book The Design of Everday Things. The actual data used to create the maps can be found on our webpage.
Mapping our data on a world map makes it convenient and easy to recognize and interpret. However, the reason we chose to use the world map is that many times people only associate a language with one country, but in reality, they are spoken all around the world and used as the official language in other countries as well. The world map allows different countries to be connected through language.
The sustainability factor of the project is mainly highlighted in the Most Aged map but is also included in the Most Spoken and Most Powerful maps. The Most Aged map shows the origination of the ten most spoken languages today and where they are now. When comparing it to the data of the Most Spoken map, one can see how the languages have sustained, developed, and spread from the time of its origination to today.
With the Most Powerful map, data was collected through the survey in order to show the perception of languages today. As expected, English was perceived to be the most powerful, even though it is the fourth most spoken. This is because we see English as belonging to the United States, which is widely considered to be the most powerful country. However, Mandarin is spoken by almost three times as many people. It does not have a strong influence here in America, though. As John Berger states in his work Ways of Seeing, “It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled” (1). Since we see America as being the most powerful nation, and many Americans only speak words in the English language, many of us relate and apply these ideals to the world as a whole by presuming it to be surrounded by the English language. If we are never directly exposed to other languages around the world, “the relation between what we see and what we know [will] never [be] settled.” When observing our data and comparing languages in regards to their age and popularity, it is evident that Mandarin is the youngest, but most spoken language. This clearly makes it the most powerful, since it has spread much faster than any other. Over time, it may spread to the United States and have a strong influence here.
Works Cited
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 2008.
Norman, Donald. The Design of Everyday Things Revised and Expanded Edition. Basic Books, 2013.
Into the Deep 