Introduction
Modern data mapping usually consists of using Geographical Information System(GIS) software, large amounts of data, and digitalized maps in the form of shape files to create the final product, but like with most modern technologies it didn’t start out there. In fact data mapping started well before computers were a concept and even almost a hundred years before the lightbulb was invented. It was here that data mapping began with ink, quills, and paper, manually drawing the maps and adding the data to it.
I have always enjoyed working with spatial data and mapping it out. This led me to wanting to learn more about the history of this field as when studying any field it is good to learn about its roots and where it all started. This timeline looks at this early era of data mapping to learn about the historical maps that pioneered the field and to see what techniques where used then and how they differed from modern ones.
Method
Knight Lab’s interactive TimelineJS tool allowed for the creation of a timeline that not only gives accounts of the different events but also allows for the different visualizations to be displayed. It does this by having the user fill out a simple Google Sheets document that the software then uses to create the timeline.
From here it was fairly straightforward as one just needed to fill out the essential columns(Year, Headline, Text, Media, and Media Credit) before publishing the Google Sheets by making it public. With the document now public, the link could now be pasted into the TimelineJS tool which would automatically generate the timeline which can be edited at anytime by updating the published Google Sheets document.
Visualization
There were many visualization decisions that needed to be made during this project. The very first of which was to change the background from the bright white to black as I prefer the darker theme. This also causes the images to pop out more as they have a more bright and vibrant color scheme which contrasts nicely with the darker background.
The second decision I made was in determining what maps and images to include in the timeline as not everything could be included. Here I decided to restrict myself to maps that used statistical data and thus did not include meteorological, geological, and national maps. While yes these maps do involve spatially mapped data, they are not people focused which is the work that I am interested in. Furthermore I didn’t want to choose multiple maps that were extremely similar unless they were relatively well know and famous maps.
The last major decision I made was in regards to the title slide as I did not want to repeat the same image multiple times. This led me to placing Charles Minard’s map of Napoleon III’s failed march due to it being so well known and thus not needing as big an Introduction.
Reflection
It was interesting to see just how much of an effect 1800’s France had on the data mapping field, especially since many modern GIS techniques still use the same fundamental principles that were developed 200 years ago. I was personally surprised when I found this out while researching the topic as while I knew some originated during this timeframe I didn’t expect so many to come from a single region of the world over a relatively short timeframe.
Overall TimelineJS was a great user friendly tool that allowed for lots of customization with the only noticeable downside being that sometimes it would take TimelineJS several minutes to update to reflect the changes made to the Google document.
If I were to do this again, I would definitely dig deeper into the more modern developments within data mapping and GIS software in order to create a more complete timeline of the entire history of the field as I was unable to find any development in the field since the late 1800’s that wasn’t the creation of ArcGIS and QGIS. Furthermore I would also like to take a look as to why it took until the early 1800’s for data maps to be created. Were the maps just not accurate enough prior to the? Was the data not being collected? Or was there some of there factor that drove the development of the field?
References
Map of dataviz firsts: Info We Trust. (n.d.). Retrieved February 3, 2022, from https://history.infowetrust.com/