Douwe Osinga's Blog: New Project: Mapped Web

Wednesday, January 21, 2004

Last weekend a good friend, Ernst Wit, came over from Italy where he currently lives. Saturday night, a couple of good belgian beers, what better way to pass the time than construct complicated statistical problems? We started talking about Land Geist and Ernst wondered whether we could project the psychological distances between countries on a map.


Physical distances are not the same as psychological distances. Physical distances are easy enough to measure, but how do we go about measuring psychological distances? Mapped Web does this by taking the chance that given a page contains the name of one country it will also contain the name of another country as a measure for psychological distance. The resulting images show us how close countries are to each other in psychological terms.


Check it out: The Mapped Web

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