Tourist traps
While it is easy to find the top tourist destinations around the world, the identities of their least popular counterparts are less publicized; they remain hidden in lists of visitor statistics, buried in the reams of numbers produced by the international tourist industry groups. You have to look carefully for them - if you search on Google for some of them, you get no hits. They have exited the global stage, perhaps happily. But who knows? Their populace remains faceless to global media, their cultures obscured by the glare of the Big Tourist Destinations: France, Spain, the United States.

I am fascinated by the mirror pairs - the visited, visible tourist destination and its corresponding, unseen twin. France and Tuvalu; Spain and Kribati; the United States and Rwanda; Italy and Tiue.The question is not, "why are some states never visited" - the answers are obvious. The least visited countries are avoided because they are small, or obscure, or instable. The question rather should be, "what is the world we see through souvenir postcards?" And: "what is the world that remains stubbornly unpictured?" As such, Tiue and Kribati are more interesting than Rwanda or Afghanistan (whose sister country is China). We know what Rwanda and Afghanistan look like. We watch the evening news. But what about the countries we never see at all, whose citizens, though affected by the policies of the world powers, remain only abstractions?

The challenge that this map answers is this: how to visualize the distance between the maximum and the miniscule? The scale itself is enormous. For every one person who visits Sierra Leone, 1,800 visit Austria. How can we represent that space without resorting to more picture postcards - iconic images that obscure instead of revealing? Visitor statistics for the most visited countries are available online - I know that most people who visit France see Paris and the surrounding area, that the most visited area in Spain is around Madrid, that Pompeii is actually Italy's most popular tourist attraction (I suppose the Vatican does not count) and that New York and Orlando battle it out for supremacy in the United States. But I do not know how to appropriately represent Tuvalu, or Tiue, or even Afghanistan. What is the most popular tourist attraction in Rwanda? The final difference between big and little may be the very stubborness with which the least visited countries resist the very categories of visitation.

Addition: 10_15
One way perhaps to imagine this is to develop a correlative between the "most visited" tourist spots and their virtual presences online. If that's not comparing apples to oranges. Ie, it's very easy to find info/pictures for France, Spain, the US, et cetera, but very difficult to find any info at all on their sister countries. Perhaps one way to get around this is to represent the "hidden" countries with the (failed) results of Google searches - graphic representation of the disappearance - or notoriety (in Rwanda's case) - of these hidden countries from the invisible currents of tourism, money, and prestige.

Addition: 10_17
As usual, we can look for some answers by returning to the source of the question: the World Tourist Organization. They collect the data, they analyze the results, they define the criteria by which tourism is judged. They are the mirror through which, like Alice, we must step to reach the upside-down wonderland of the invisible countries. And what does the organization do? According to its website, "Through tourism, WTO aims to stimulate economic growth and job creation, provide incentives for protecting the environment and cultural heritage, and promote peace, prosperity and respect for human rights."

I n the right-side-up world of the WTO (an arm of the UN charged with creating partnerships between UN countries and tourist businesses), tourism is an agent for positive change. It is a savior of underdeveloped countries, creating jobs, attracting foreign currency, and tying the destination country more fully into the global culture. Being glimpsed by foreigners gives these hidden countries a face, and avoice, in the global market.

The power of this mirror rests in its ability to scale the world to a manageable order. Like the representation of distance in the Eames short film Powers of 10, the orders of magnitude described by the scales of WTO reports are almost too great to visualize, except in gradual degrees of change. And like Powers of 10, the world seen in the mirror is almost unbearably orderly, with the developed tourist powerhouses separated from the lowest ranks of unvisited nations by a difference of size, not kind. The myth behind Powers of 10 is that the structure of the universe is masterable, symmetric, and understood. It asserts that the very smallest particles and the very largest spaces share a common structure. The myth behind the WTO rankings is that more tourists will turn Rwanda into the US, Tiue into France.

The more I look at this project, the more I see a funny and tragic commentary on the Powers of 10 myth of the world. When we zoom out, the world looks more like Rwanda than Austria. It looks more like Tuvalu than France - mostly because we don't even know what Tuvalu looks like. Tuvalu is opaque and impenetrable. There is no common tourist imagery yet. We have not yet been told what to see in it.It's some place that we've never seen - except in that it looks like any other Pacific island. Tourism depends on the construction of a different and unique identity - for the benefit of those looking in from the outside. But only when you live on Tuvalu will you experience what makes it different from the next island. Or, to take a very different case, only when you live in Rwanda will you understand how the United States works. Look inside Afghanistan and you will find a place for China.The world behind the mirror works on principles of analogy, not congruence. Bigger is different.

Statistics
>> 15 Most and least visited countries (from the World Tourism Organization)
>> spreadsheet analysis

World Map (as of 10_9)
>> presentation (click mouse to advance)

World Map (as of 10_17)
>> presentation (click mouse to advance)