More of a classification question, but I’m really curious about what the metric would look like if we try to be systematic about it.

For context, there’s several countries that are more or less famous for being geographically discontinuous. Top of the mind nowadays is Azerbaijan, whose sizeable territory of Nakhchivan has no land connections with the rest of the country. There’s also Equatorial Guinea, whose capital city is on island which is smaller than the continental territory. That’s the same for Denmark, although we seem to think of it less, because of the much smaller distances and significantly more connectivity. Then you have Indonesia which I currently think might be the most discontinuous country, with territory spanning across at least 4 major landmasses but which are shared with other countries.

But then you have countries such as Greece, Japan, or even Sweden, which are more or less archipelagic countries but do not stand out in the way Indonesia or Azerbaijan does.

How can we define a measure of geographic discontinuity that gives us a reasonable ranking? I would imagine we start with some measure that looks how much of the whole territory is in one contagious unit (less prominent main landmass = more discontinuity) but perhaps we also introduce average distance between units.

  • @[email protected]English
    5•1 year ago

    Step 1: Find the area of each chunk. The biggest chunk is your main chunk.

    Step 2: Find the distance between the closest edge of main chunk and the center of each other chunk individually.

    Step 3: Discontinuity of each chunk is area of chunk * distance from main chunk / total area.

    Step 4: Total discontinuity is sum of each chunk’s discontinuity.

    Bolded parts are important. If you use the center of the main chunk, larger main chunk radii make other chunks seem more discontinuous than they should be. If you use the closest edge of other chunk’s, you don’t account for the entire area of the other chunk.

    This will give you a number that is bigger when there are more and/or bigger pieces that are further away, and smaller when the opposite is true, normalized for the total area of the country so bigger countries aren’t penalized just because they’re bigger.