Show: A New Way to Look at the World

Show: A New Way to Look at the World is a fantastic interactive site that takes demographics and societal data and displays it in a unique way for the United States, Japan, and the world as a whole.  Show would be a great resource for not only history and social studies classrooms (It’s a sociological goldmine!) but also geography and math classes as you can use the data, correlations, and spatial relationships to interpret the maps.

Begin using Show by choosing the region you wish to view, either the United States or Japan (divided by states and prefectures, respectively) or a world map that will deal with countries.  You can then choose a category for study, whether they be broad concepts such as basic demographics (population, language, religion, etc.), more specific concepts like natural resources, GDP, and education, to the more unique categories like distribution of Wal-Marts and number of UFO sightings.

Take some time to explore before you try using this unique resource in class or have students use it during a free period or as a different way to research.  I got lost in the maps on Show for quite a long time myself and still haven’t seen half of it!