The old maps from the 19th century are probably the best graphs you can find. There are complete contrast to the aesthetics you find today. The yellowish paper, hand-drawn graphs, and deep, warm colors from the printing method provide a superb look. The effort also needed to make these graphs is always gratifying since I know it took time and planning to create each graph.
A new site, Handsome Atlas, shows the pages from the U.S. Census books from the late 19th century. The U.S. was emerging from the Civil War and the Census publications became more illustrious.
The first image is a chart on the political parties in the U.S. as it relates to presidential elections. The chart is confusing, but there are some redeeming characteristics. First, it adds substantial narrative alongside the graph. The narrative does not focus on explaining the graph, but instead is a true supplement to the entire story. The graph also utilizes branch or river-like sketching within the colored region to show small sub-movements within the political parties. This is just about lost in contemporary politics, but the two-party system of yore had substantial movements which could eventually replace an established party.
The second graph looks at how individuals occupy their time. It is a tree diagram showing the distribution of people in various industries and education by state. Older charts seem almost brazen in their willingness to simplify data for presentation. It is very useful to see a simple distribution of a few key industries in a single graph.
The third graph shows the rank and change-in-rank of state populations over time. It’s reminiscent of ladder, or slopegraphs, that are popular today. In a nice, but a little confusing, bit of minimalism, the nodes terminate if there is not a change in a state’s population rank.
On the topic of population, the last image is a graph showing the distribution of the population. The western frontier is clearly visible in the graph. The color is fantastic, a intended by-product of the printing style of the time. It is unfortunate inkjets can’t reproduce the same warmth.
It is also interesting to see statistics of, as the site puts it, your great-great grandfather. There is, of course, the dated, old-timey language like “idiots” and “lunacy” graphs, but there is also substantial attention paid to oats, tobacco, corn, and wheat—this was before the American industrial revolution. The western frontier is literally visible in the maps. Political issues are also clearly apparent as they are careful to label if Native Americans and other marginalized populations are included—since their individuality was dubious at the time. Immigration was more focused on the migration from upper-European nations—a distinction that wouldn’t be made today.
12th September 2012
Notes: 11
![sunfoundation:
The Statistics behind the US Civil War in Interactive Infographics
The Civil War [elibrosen.com] is the final student project of Eli Rosenfor Golan Levin’s Interactive Art and Computational Design course of 2012.
The project provides a data-driven interface to explore the stories and facts behind the U.S. Civil War. Accordingly, people are able to navigate its history chronologically (via an interactive timeline) or geographically (via an interactive map).
The timeline acts as a bidirectional bar graph that pairs the casualties for the Union and the Confederacy for each battle, providing an intuitive impression for the scale of the battle and for how evenly casualties were distributed. A dual slider acts as a time range selector.
This is a superb graph, one that I hope teachers would use in the classroom. I am a fan of civil war history, but it’s admittedly tough to keep track of all the battles and have a larger sense of the big picture.
One improvement, however, would be going beyond total causalities and causalities by battle. Perhaps the most important deciding factor in the civil war is the percentage of troops lost by each side. The union, because of its size, often lost more people in the crucial battles, but the confederates lost a larger portion of their soldiers.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m5wb9cS1i21qhn3smo1_1280.png)
The Civil War [elibrosen.com] is the final student project of Eli Rosenfor Golan Levin’s Interactive Art and Computational Design course of 2012.The project provides a data-driven interface to explore the stories and facts behind the U.S. Civil War. Accordingly, people are able to navigate its history chronologically (via an interactive timeline) or geographically (via an interactive map).
The timeline acts as a bidirectional bar graph that pairs the casualties for the Union and the Confederacy for each battle, providing an intuitive impression for the scale of the battle and for how evenly casualties were distributed. A dual slider acts as a time range selector.
This is a superb graph, one that I hope teachers would use in the classroom. I am a fan of civil war history, but it’s admittedly tough to keep track of all the battles and have a larger sense of the big picture.
One improvement, however, would be going beyond total causalities and causalities by battle. Perhaps the most important deciding factor in the civil war is the percentage of troops lost by each side. The union, because of its size, often lost more people in the crucial battles, but the confederates lost a larger portion of their soldiers.
Reblogged From sunfoundation
![In the olden-days, when “epidemics” were frequent and really meant something, cholera was wrecking havoc on London. Unsure where the disease was originating, John Snow mapped the residence of folks who contracted cholera. Soon enough, it was clear that the Broad Street well was the source of the outbreak—despite inconclusive direct evidence of chorea in water samples.
There were some outliers, however. After some detective work, a pair of outliers were explained:
[she] had lived in the Broad Street area at one time and liked the taste of the water from the pump so much that she had bottles of it brought to her regularly. Water drawn from the pump on 31 August, the day of the outbreak, was delivered to her. As was her custom, she and her visiting niece took a glass of the pump water for refreshment…
Today, many designers would likely use a bubble plot to display density on a map. But frequent overlapping can be confusing, this approach is much better to show correlation around a particular point.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m5vensUmkT1rnhfauo1_1280.jpg)
In the olden-days, when “epidemics” were frequent and really meant something, cholera was wrecking havoc on London. Unsure where the disease was originating, John Snow mapped the residence of folks who contracted cholera. Soon enough, it was clear that the Broad Street well was the source of the outbreak—despite inconclusive direct evidence of chorea in water samples.
There were some outliers, however. After some detective work, a pair of outliers were explained:
[she] had lived in the Broad Street area at one time and liked the taste of the water from the pump so much that she had bottles of it brought to her regularly. Water drawn from the pump on 31 August, the day of the outbreak, was delivered to her. As was her custom, she and her visiting niece took a glass of the pump water for refreshment…
Today, many designers would likely use a bubble plot to display density on a map. But frequent overlapping can be confusing, this approach is much better to show correlation around a particular point.
Beautifulyy designed tornado map by @JohnNelsonIDV showing 56 years of tornado tracks: bit.ly/K9v37B #interactive
The use of a histogram next to the map is very smart.
Interactive graph from Processing. I really like the monochrome color scheme.
