Category Archives: Amusing Historical Map Features

The Thermal Conductivity of Tungsten is an Argument

We all have our favorite pieces of information visualization, and many have been presented by Edward Tufte, but I prefer this more than any other, and more for the content than the representation. For those unfamiliar with Tufte’s The Visual … Continue reading

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A Map to Nowhere

The mayor of Salt Lake City recently took issue with his city being described as significantly smaller and less connected than London. There are many ways to gauge importance from a social and cultural sense, such as calculating the centrality … Continue reading

Posted in Amusing Historical Map Features, Natural Law, Spatial Humanities, Visualization | 2 Comments

The inarguable legitimacy-providing splendour of goats

Tomorrow I’ll be demoing my Stanford Spatial Drupal distribution for some Stanford folks and David Rumsey.  The demo includes an unrectified map of Germany around the Rhine from the 16th century that, shockingly, does not come from Rumsey’s amazing collection.  … Continue reading

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If You’re Going to San Francisco

As a follow-up to the previous post, here’s a gallery of various representations of San Francisco. This first set comes from Eric Fischer, who mapped accessibility in San Francisco by taxi, based on data from Cabspotting and inspired by an … Continue reading

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Posted on by Elijah Meeks | Comments Off

Digital Humanities as XKCD Community Map

Something tells me that Glen Worthey’s desired map of the Digital Humanities would look more like this: While enjoyable and probably not deserving of too critical a gaze, it illustrates the problem of metrics and visualization in dealing with large … Continue reading

Posted in Amusing Historical Map Features, Social Media Literacy, Spatial Humanities, The Digital Humanities as..., Visualization | 1 Comment

Amusing Features of Historical Maps

Historical maps provide us with a cloudy window into the past.  Sometimes, what you see through that window is silly.  Below is the legend from A. Keith Johnston’s 1854 Moral & statistical chart showing the geographical distribution of man according … Continue reading

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