The Many Tendrils of the Octopus Map

TL;DR

The paper investigates the octopus map as a genre of persuasive cartography, combining historical analysis with a crowd-sourced empirical study to understand how data structure and visual metaphors drive conspiratorial interpretations. It decomposes the visual and structural elements that produce octopodal readings (centrality, tentacular reach, intentionality, grabby-ness, and threat) and tests whether non-octopus designs can elicit similar rhetoric. Findings show that even without explicit octopus imagery, maps with certain data arrangements and visuals can evoke octopus-like interpretations, with connection density emerging as a salient factor. The work highlights ethical implications for visualization design and advocates for deeper examination of visual rhetoric and its societal impact in data displays.

Abstract

Conspiratorial thinking can connect many distinct or distant ills to a central cause. This belief has visual form in the octopus map: a map where a central force (for instance a nation, an ideology, or an ethnicity) is depicted as a literal or figurative octopus, with extending tendrils. In this paper, we explore how octopus maps function as visual arguments through an analysis of historical examples as well as a through a crowd-sourced study on how the underlying data and the use of visual metaphors contribute to specific negative or conspiratorial interpretations. We find that many features of the data or visual style can lead to "octopus-like" thinking in visualizations, even without the use of an explicit octopus motif. We conclude with a call for a deeper analysis of visual rhetoric, and an acknowledgment of the potential for the design of data visualizations to contribute to harmful or conspiratorial thinking.

Figures (11)

• Figure 1: The Serio-Comic War Map for the Year 1877 by Frederick W. Rose, published shortly after Russia attacked the Ottoman Empire in response to the Turkish massacre of Christian Bulgarians. Here Russia is depicted as the expansionist octopus, battling the Turkish Empire and grasping for various other countries, including Finland, Poland, and Persia.
• Figure 2: Political cartoons using the octopus motif, in both cases implying monopolizing entities as octopuses acquisitively grasping for control.
• Figure 3: Two octopus maps from opposite sides of the first World War, each using similar designs and data to cast their opponent as an octopus. On the left, Prussia's century of territorial change casts it as an acquisitive octopus, with the Austro-Hungarian empire a subordinate but nonetheless acquisitive partner in crime. On the right, English colonial acquisitions across the world from the 7th century onward are cast as part of a plan of control of the world's oceans.
• Figure 4: The cover of a 1935 antifascist magazine depicting Adolf Hitler as a fascist octopus with tendrils around neighboring lands fascism. Note that, at the point of this publication, many of the acquisitions noted here had yet to occur (for instead, Austria in the Anschluss of 1938, or Alsace-Lorraine as part of terms of the armistice after the fall of France in 1940).
• Figure 5: The 1930 cover of Ante los Bárbaros ("Before the Barbarians") by J. M. Vargas Vila, an anti-imperialist work accusing the United States of using the First World War as cover to continue its imperialist ambitions in the western hemisphere without European interference.