The History of Cartography since 1870


Visualization

Introduction

I visualized the history of Cartography since 1870 using TimelineJS. Cartographical data is one of early topics of visualization. TimelineJS is an open-source tool that allows users create interactive timelines. For this assignment, I followed basic guidelines of TimelineJS, filling data into pre-defined the Google Spreadsheet template. Original resources are from “Milestones in the history of thematic cartography, statistical graphics, and data visualization” by Michael Friendly and Daniel Denis.

 

Process

  1. Open the Google Spreadsheet template.
  2. In the resource website, I picked only cartography history data from the milestone. Details and images are shown by clicking each event on the milestone graph.
  3. Fill out required fields. The first slide is a title page, which doesn’t require timeframe data.
  4. Copy the url of the spreadsheet, and paste to generate the timeline.

 

Result

Click here to see the result.

 

Discussion of future directions

TimelineJS is a great tool to show small number of data points, especially datapoint that occur in a sequential order. One downside of TimelineJS is that users only can include only one link of media, regardless of types.