Crossposted from The Wired Campus

A playful new Web site built by scholars at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County uses political cartoons to explain the U.S. Electoral College and give facts about each state’s political history. Called USDemocrazy.net, the irreverent site is targeted at a high school audience. But it is also designed to get a chuckle out of anyone following this year’s presidential race.

The hub of the site is a hand-drawn map of the United States, with each state renamed to offer a glimpse of its culture (California is called “Dude,” for instance, and North and South Dakota are labeled North and South Blizzard). Clicking on the states’ names reveals almanac-style information about each one, along with a political cartoon (California’s is a drawing of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger holding up Ronald Regan and Richard Nixon, two former presidents who hailed from the state). There’s also a “Loony-O-Meter” that gives a one-to-five rating of how odd a state’s politics are, though many of the states have not yet been rated.

Most of the drawings were done by Kevin Kallaugher, who goes by the name Kal, and who is the political cartoonist for The Economist. Mr. Kallaugher is an artist in residence at the university and worked with its Imaging Research Center to create the Web site.

“Cartoons are often used in textbooks and school texts to digest the world in a way people can understand and is inviting,” said Mr. Kallaugher in an interview on Friday. The goal of the site, he said, is to “use humor and use cartoons to enunciate the complex world that we live in and the government that we have.”

One goal of the site seems to be to keep political cartoons relevant in the Internet era. In the foreword to his recent book of political cartoons, Mr. Kallaugher writes that “the future of newspaper cartoons is dimming.”

“Recognizing that reality, I am one of those political cartoonists looking to embrace the Internet and the moving image as a future source of satire,” he wrote.