Twelve Unusual World Maps: Stereotypes, Autocomplete, Alcohol and Red Hair

School atlases show borders, capitals and rivers. The internet prefers maps of everything else: which drink a country likes best, where world leaders went to university, what Google suggests when you type a country's name. These twelve maps went viral in 2013 and 2014, and each one is a small lesson in how data, satire and stereotype can be dressed in the same colours.

Maps built on surveys: tolerance, emotion and happiness

1. Racial tolerance by country. Max Fisher first published this map on the Washington Post's WorldViews blog in May 2013, and it reappeared in the paper's "40 maps that explain the world" that August. It drew on World Values Survey data used by the Swedish economists Niclas Berggren and Therese Nilsson in a study of economic freedom and tolerance. It caused an instant debate, and Fisher later flagged data errors for Bangladesh and Hong Kong, a reminder that one survey question can carry a heavy load on a map.

2. Countries ranked by emotional tendencies. Also from the Washington Post collection, this map colours countries by how much emotion people reported in a poll. It measures what respondents said about their own feelings, which makes it a snapshot of answers, not a portrait of national character.

3. The happiness map. Happiness maps usually draw on polls in which people rate their own lives on a scale, so they record how satisfied people say they are with their lives at a given time.

Satire: the world according to Americans

4. The World According to Americans comes from Mapping Stereotypes, a series by the London-based designer Yanko Tsvetkov, who publishes it on his site alphadesigner.com. Each map relabels the continents as a particular group might see them, and the jokes cut in every direction. Read it as satire: the humour comes from how wrong and how revealing the labels are.

Google autocomplete maps of Europe and Asia

5 and 6. Autocomplete maps. The idea started with a map of US states labelled with Google's suggestions for "Why is [state] so…", shared by the Twitter account Amazing Maps. Randal Olson, then a researcher at Michigan State University, made a version for Europe, and a Reddit user called system637 produced one for Asia. The results are funny and sometimes unkind, but they reflect the most common searches at one moment and in one language, filtered by Google's own algorithm.

Data maps: drinks, leaders, red hair and birthplaces

7. Most popular type of alcoholic beverage. The ChartsBin map colours each country by the drink that makes up the largest share of its recorded alcohol consumption, measured in litres of pure alcohol: beer, wine, spirits or "other", which covers drinks such as sorghum and millet beers, rice wine and cider. The map shows the dominant type, not how much people drink overall; Russia, for example, scores high on both beer and spirits.

8. Educational backgrounds of world leaders. Posted to Reddit's MapPorn community in December 2013, this map shows where heads of government studied, highlighting how many were educated abroad, often in the United States, Britain or France.

9. Red hair in Europe. Red hair appears in about 2–6% of people of northwestern European ancestry. Scotland has the highest share of redheads in the world, around 13% by one estimate, with Ireland and Wales close behind. The colour is mainly caused by recessive variants of the MC1R gene, so two carriers can have a red-haired child. The Udmurts of Russia's Volga region were once called "the most red-headed men in the world", and their capital Izhevsk has held a red-hair festival since 2004.

10. The where-to-be-born index. The Economist Intelligence Unit's 2013 where-to-be-born index rated 80 countries and territories on ten quality-of-life factors plus forecasts of future income per person. Switzerland came first, followed by Australia and Norway.

Opinion and photography maps

11. Women's attractiveness by country. This TargetMap graphic is a user-made ranking of personal taste, and it says more about the people who voted than about any country.

12. The most photographed places in the world. Heat maps like this one plot the locations of geotagged photos uploaded to photo-sharing sites. The bright clusters show where travellers and locals point their cameras most, which makes it a fun, if rough, guide to famous sights.

How to read a viral map

Before sharing a map, check four things: who made it, what was measured, when, and what the colour bands mean. A darker shade can mean a larger total, a higher rate or simply a category. Totals and rates tell different stories: a big country will lead on visitor numbers while a small island may lead on visitors per resident. Blank areas often mean missing data, not zero.

Some useful companions on this site: our world-as-100-people guide turns global statistics into a village of 100, the Ed Fairburn feature shows maps used as a canvas for portraits, and the world-map whiteboard story follows a boy who drew the world from memory.

Related reading

• Africa on the Map: Why Projection Changes the Way Continents Look
• Stunning Time Lapse Map Video Shows 1000 Years Of Europe's History In 3 Minutes
• This Is Roughly 200 Years Of American History In One Mesmerizing GIF

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