![]() ![]() One aspect of this history that was revealed to me through this research was the ways in which cartographers developed the multivariate capacities of cartographic language. Access to paper copies of these publications enabled me to look closely at each map for the incremental changes to legend design, palette choices, data classification, line weight, and layout that gradually over time coalesced into design protocols for thematic cartographic language. To achieve that understanding required a research library with an interdisciplinary, international collection of nineteenth-century maps, atlases, journals, and textbooks, which I found in the holdings of The New York Public Library. I sought to explore how the maps moved from a focus on the techniques themselves to the development of full thematic layouts expressing a comprehensive statement about the data variables. (For important lessons regarding these design histories, see for example the work of Susan Schulten and Jason Hansen.)įor my fellowship, I wanted to hear the dirt, to understand why some techniques thrived in certain circles and not elsewhere, what was rejected along the way, whose career blossomed as a result and whose was wrecked, and which topics were left for twentieth century cartographers to tackle. They were also immediately put to use to manipulate statistical data and inflame public opinion on political and social topics, for the same principles which support effective information design can also of course support effective mis-information design. As modern as these techniques may appear, they are built with a visual language that developed in the West during the 1800s in response to conditions including changes in printing technology, the rise of something called "statistics," the search for a "universal language" for sharing statistical analyses across international borders, the availability of state funding, and the aesthetic pronouncements of a few particularly influential individuals.Īs new techniques were introduced and shared within and across disciplines, they were quickly put to use by scientists, politicians, social reformers, and engineers to explore data sets and reveal patterns in ways that powerfully influenced the development of railway lines, for example, or the allocation of funding to alleviate poverty. What cartographers vaguely refer to as "thematic techniques" are the very same that we encounter daily in the maps and graphics of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal: the use of circle sizes ("proportional circles") to depict the number of people in Iraqi refugee camps, for example, or grids of squares ("cartograms") to visualize the latest proportions of electoral votes for each candidate by state. Hovering in the air between us was an incredulous elephant: this is how she spent the gift of four weeks in the Map Room, where masterpieces of cartography from across the centuries, elsewhere protected beyond the credentialed gates of private research libraries, are here available for public consultation? Instead of communing with maps from Joan Blaeu's seventeenth century masterpiece, the Atlas mayor, she chose to leaf through yellowed, crumbling international statistical congress proceedings and the dusty annual reports of departments of public works, in search of black-and-white foldout maps and line diagrams? Umm?") or a swift segue back to normal topics ("Huh. When I told friends and family about my project, there would be a pause, followed by either a confused search for a response ("Oh. ![]()
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