A graphics editor at The New York Times.

Global Digital Divide

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.

However, one problem of this method is that it doesn't consider the comparably high use of mobile devices to access the internet in African regions.

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.

Normal version
Hi-res version

The graphic was exhibited at

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October 2011