In metropolises, socioeconomics, demographics, and the built environment shape geographic identity–even stepping across neighborhoods can feel like “the entire world [has been] remade.” In 2015, researchers also found that personality traits vary geographically across Greater London. Big Five personality traits, the most clinically accepted framework for understanding personality, clustered across neighborhoods and by proximity to the city center. These results beg the question, does New York, too, vary geographically in personality type?

To test this theory, I recreated the BBC London survey and shared it across every NYC neighborhood subreddit. Curiosity alone drove more than 2,500 people to take the survey, resulting in enough data to surface early insights. These results revealed two key takeaways:  (1) neighborhood personalities differ significantly from the citywide average and (2) neighborhoods are distinct from one another–though more data is needed to sharpen the picture. New Yorkers can see their results by taking the survey now.

The above map shows the correlation between NYC neighborhoods,  Big Five personality traits, and life satisfaction, with color signifying how far a neighborhood’s traits differ from the citywide mean. Note that (1) some, but not all, of these differences are statistically significant, and (2) the results may shift as the dataset becomes more complete. This early evidence encourages me to continue filling out the map.

When used ethically, data like this has a wide range of applications from location-based marketing, retail site selection, or even building a StreetEasy competitor that connects people with neighborhoods based on personality.

I’m keeping the survey open and actively seeking more responses. You can check back here to see how the results evolve over time.

The post What your New York Neighborhood Says About You (Backed by Data) appeared first on Nightingale.

You’ve surely seen this map or a variation of it somewhere on the internet. If, like me, you’re a professional information designer, you know it’s part of an entire genre, including animated versions of it:

Or the effect of distortion on simple concepts like Great Circle Distance. This is the area within 5000km of Paris on a Mercator projection emphasizing the geographic distortion that happens the more north you get. You would expect a circle but instead get a shape reminiscent of a guitar pick.

Or interactive versions like this one by Ian Johnson that let you examine how different projections distort the shape and position of countries in different ways.

If, on the other hand, you have no idea what’s going on here, the short answer is that in transferring the shape of the surface of the Earth from a sphere to a flat screen you have to make certain decisions about whether and how much you want to maintain accurate representations of distance, area, grid alignment and other features. This is an editorial decision, there is no one right way of showing geography. Like most problematic subjects, Aaron Sorkin’s surrealist comedy The West Wing provided an overly idealistic and peppy explanation of the problem of map projections.

These maps are popular because they touch on the contingent nature of information display and emphasize the importance of revealing the human hand in communicating information. Sadly, we’re so constrained by our limited data visualization literacy that we can only really discuss these design choices with the venerable choropleth map because everyone learned how to read it in their 7th grade geography course. Every time one of these maps shows up on Reddit or BlueSky it is met with much excitement and adulation. Well-meaning people have claimed that the Mercator projection has made us think that northern hemisphere countries are better than equatorial and southern hemisphere countries because their size is exaggerated. All of that is a real problem because the “amazing” quality of these maps is shared by another amazing map.

Land doesn’t vote, the saying goes. And even when administrative regions (whether practically empty states in the American West or tiny countries in the EU) exert an outsized influence that’s not a reference to their geographic area but rather to their population. There are times when you need an accurate understanding of the area of land. You might be a farmer looking to expand your acreage or planning a new Amazon warehouse, but it has almost nothing to do with politics, culture or society. When we celebrate maps that make land important we are unintentionally enabling much more problematic maps like the Impeach This map.

There is a difference between maps created to show the distortions inherent in map projections and those created intentionally to mislead. But for readers it’s not so clear when we lack the tools to talk about them meaningfully. The distortions of the Mercator projection don’t just exist in some theoretical vacuum—they’re a reminder of how easily visualizations can be weaponized to amplify or bury ideas. To counteract this, we need to get better at asking specific questions: Why this projection? Why these data choices? What’s being highlighted or hidden? By learning to spot and articulate these design decisions, we can go beyond cheering for “amazing” maps and start seeing when they’re actively doing harm. Until we learn to name the ways maps shape narratives and teach others to do the same, we’ll stay stuck in a cycle of celebrating the familiar while missing the bigger picture.

Back in 2015, I attended the NACIS conference in Fargo, North Dakota. Fargo was selected because it was nearly at the center of North America but, as anyone who was forced to fly there on a series of progressively smaller airplanes knows, it’s actually much farther away from the rest of North America than, say, Chicago. That’s because in the modern world “close” has little to do with area and more to do with the transportation networks we’re embedded in via road, rail, sea lanes and air routes. The way we refer to sea and air travel (routes and lanes) is a reminder that even the crow doesn’t fly in a straight line.

But to talk about the networks on which we move goods, people, electricity and information would require people to know something about networks. Unfortunately, we don’t learn about networks in the 7th grade like we do maps. And it doesn’t stop there, if you ask a data visualization expert they’ll often tell you that you, too, do not need to learn how to read a network visualization or a flow diagram or any other kind of complex data visualization. Which is unfortunate because networks better explain the modern world than most amazing maps.

As a result, we’re stuck with only a few familiar methods for displaying anything more complex than a bar chart or line chart. Maps are one of those few methods that we know people can read. That familiarity gives us the ability to then have a second-order conversation about the data transformation and other information design decisions we have to make when it comes to any kind of map or chart or diagram. And that’s an interesting point to make, that’s why those maps are so popular. But there are so many other interesting points to make about data visualization, and we need to spend more time popularizing those rather than just repeating this same fact about map projections. If we don’t move on to other interesting points about information design, then we’ll never grow as readers or practitioners.

The post This Map Helps Fascists appeared first on Nightingale.

I created an audio-visual map containing a guided data sonification of the eclipse’s path of totality. Data sonification is the practice of representing data through sound. As a data scientist, information designer, and audio enthusiast, I have found data sonification to be an exciting realm for representing data engagingly and creatively. This project was in support of the Georgia Tech Sonification Lab’s endeavor to create accessibility resources for the total solar eclipse.

The benefits of data sonification

Data sonification has enormous potential in information communication and is especially beneficial to the data viz community in two significant ways. First, expressing data in the form of audio makes data accessible to people who are visually impaired or blind. There is a heavy reliance on visualization in data analysis and educational storytelling, but by integrating sonification into these realms, data can be consumed without reliance on sight. Second, data sonification is beneficial for engagement, sparking curiosity, and stirring emotion within someone. A sound composition may have the power to activate a poignant reaction more than a static data visualization can, just as hearing a powerful speech may stir more emotion than reading it on a page. 

The process

This project involved several phases and allowed me to practice an iterative design process. I was able to explore how I wanted to convey the geographical movement of the eclipse’s presence through sound and visualization. I brainstormed with hand-drawn sketches; I used R to wrangle the data; I worked on the sound design in Logic Pro X; and I created the visual animation components with Adobe Illustrator and Adobe After Effects. This project definitely challenged me creatively and technically!

Mapping geography to sound

How do you convey geographical movement in the form of audio? One way is to associate latitude with pitch, and longitude with stereo image. As a data point moves south to north, the listener will hear a change from low-frequency to high-frequency notes. As a data point moves west to east, the listener will hear a “panning” effect from left to right in their speakers or headphones. I felt that this would be an intuitive approach to expressing the path of totality through sound.

To determine the range of notes I would use, I began with the minimum and maximum note values. I imagined the United States framed by a bounding rectangle, with “extreme coordinates” in each corner. Then, I mapped binned groups of latitude values to notes in the G major scale, where the northernmost coordinate matched with the highest note and the southernmost coordinate matched with the lowest note. I also wanted to sonically capture major cities along the route of totality with brief audio flourishes, as well as a quietly spoken announcement of the city name.

The next step would be to explore how to layer these sonic components together into a single composition. 

Exploring musicality

To make a data sonification pleasant and engaging, it can be helpful to bring forth a sense of musicality. I decided to limit the pitch mapping to a G major scale and use a piano software instrument to create a sense of auditory harmony. While this limited selection of notes would reduce the precision with which I could express the data, I wanted to avoid additional notes that might create dissonance. 

To improve musicality, I thought it would be nice to represent the path of totality with a series of arpeggios (notes played in sequence), with each starting note increasing in pitch and latitude. These layered arpeggios could create a feeling of ascension and northern movement along the eclipse’s path. 

To represent major cities along the path, I integrated brief musical flourishes (groupings of a few notes in the key of G) that would accompany the arpeggios. To create an underlying musical foundation and sense of wholeness, I implemented two chordal violin expressions also in the key of G. The first of these is a deep, resounding chord in the lower register of the scale, fading out at the halfway point of the path of totality. The second chord is in the higher register, fading in at the halfway point and ending with the completion of the sonification.

Presentation through guided narration

The presentation of a data sonification is particularly important, to ensure that the listener can successfully understand the sonification. Even if a sonification sounds interesting, listeners will only be able to walk away with an informed perspective if they are first introduced to the meaning behind each audio parameter. Providing a “sonic vocabulary” to listeners will help them recognize individual sonic features and derive meaning from the composition as a whole.

Jordan Wirfs-Brock, an avid practitioner of data sonification with whom I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate, has greatly influenced me in this regard. She emphasizes the importance of training a listener to provide more familiarity with the data sonification and ensure an educational experience.

Beyond the presentation of the sonic vocabulary, I wanted the audio-visual map to have a narrative, storylike characteristic. I wrote a script I could follow to guide the listener through the context and framework for this data sonification project. For example, this is how I introduced the extreme coordinates:

By providing this chronological guidance, I hoped to prepare the listener for the final macro sonification. 

Reflections, limitations, and what’s next

There are innumerable ways to approach data sonification; this is just one way. From the audio parameters chosen to the degree of musicality to the interpretation of the data, and every design choice in between, data sonification can be a truly creative practice with vast possibilities. 

Another feature I would have liked to explore with this project is interactivity. A map with interactive sonification elements could allow users to explore and learn at their own pace. In future projects, I’d also like to explore the use of different audio parameters. While I think longitude to stereo field mapping is intuitive as a means of “hearing” west to east, it is limited in that the effect is best experienced with quality headphones or speakers (and might be lost on typical laptop or phone speakers). I’d also be interested in branching out from the limited major scale; I think the notes progressed too predictably to be intriguing.

I hope this project inspires fellow data viz practitioners and audio enthusiasts to try their hand at data sonification. What would you create?

The post ‘The Data Diaries’: Data Sonification of the Total Solar Eclipse appeared first on Nightingale.

Under her art direction, the final design—which stretched across the entire front and back page of the paper—won gold medals from the Society for News Design in multiple categories including “Story Design,” “Front Page,” and “Combination Print & Digital.” Carrie, herself, also won gold in the “Individual Portfolio” category.

In the following conversation, Carrie talks through the process of capturing one million deaths in print media. This interview was first published on “Newspaper Design.” It has been lightly edited.

How did you conceive the award-winning “One Million: A Nation’s Immeasurable Grief”?

When I was asked to do this, I knew it would have to have news value, be informative, be sophisticated but also carry the weight of the loss somehow. I was looking for a way to do all of that.

I heard the graphics editor Jeremy White, who was working on this, already had ideas. The dots concept was his—I just saw it and saw some of the shapes the dots might take. When I saw the United States formed by the dots and each of them was a person, I knew that was the image. It was informative, emotional, and simple, while also being very complex. It did a lot of work without overwhelming the viewer. Adding the annotation that each dot was a human was something I felt got to the heart of the image, so I knew we’d need to include that somehow.

There was talk of making this front page bigger than the others to make the statement that this was a historic moment. So my managers, Fred Bierman and Andrew Sondern, and I wanted to make it a wraparound page one if we could, though we knew it would be a challenge.

Was it even possible? We needed to see a print version of the graphic. Then we needed to figure out how it would print best on newsprint. We really wanted the dots to print well. This was very complicated and involved trying various dot sizes and ink combinations (grayscale and black & white) and opacities. We also had to figure out whether it was worth adding outlines for the country, states, counties, etc. We actually did an eight-page press test to make sure we were doing the right combination for print so that it would be readable. After that we just had to wait until we were closer to the date to finalize the map with the latest data.

“We really wanted the dots to print well. This was very complicated and involved trying various dot sizes and ink combinations and opacities.”

At the same time we had to convince editors at The New York Times to just run this on the front page and clear the back page of ads for this paper. One thing on the front page of The New York Times?! And it’s not even a story start. But once people saw this, they started to get on board. They found it as moving as we did. Tom Bodkin and Tom Jolly were very helpful in helping us move forward.

Then at last, there was writing of the display type, which took a village. But I believe where we landed was right.

It was a sleepless night both before and after this went to press.

How have readers responded to that unconventional approach?

We never do something like this for page one. Never. Readers took note. Of the responses I heard, people found value in this treatment in remembering loss and recognizing what we, as a nation had been through. That meant a lot to me, because that’s why I do what I do.

“We never do something like this for page one. Never.”

Which software have you used to make it?

I know our graphics team has special software to gather and analyze data, and they had been gathering since the start of the pandemic. For me, to make sure it would print well, I placed the high res .tiff I received from Jeremy into an InDesign document with the single dot annotation and the display type and exported it as a pdf with our press settings to insure everything would stay together and print well. Then I had to place onto the live pages in Newsgate as a single image. But with the normal page elements (like the NYT flag) undisturbed in our system.

This page won so many top awards in different categories of the SND competition. Why is this work striking from your point of view?

First, I just want to say that I am so honored and proud of this work receiving recognition.  Everyone involved worked very hard and with great care. I think it’s striking because to me, this feels like more than a newspaper page. This feels like more than a layout. This feels like a moment of recognition and memoriam that we visualized.

“This feels like more than a newspaper page.”

That is something that I didn’t know was possible but that is how I see this page. This feels like more than a layout. This feels like a moment of recognition and memoriam that we visualized. That is something that I didn’t know was possible but that is how I see this.

As an artist, what is the emotional feeling that passes through you when doing this?

I’ll be honest, I cried a lot working on this. Ans I’m okay with that. This was such a massive loss and I think really letting myself feel that, lets me know that I’m doing work that is honest and has depth.

To whom are you going to dedicate this award?

To the readers and the future readers (two of which are my kids). Journalism makes the world a better place, and I’m glad I am still a part of that effort.

How do you approach your projects?

I always ask myself what’s the core of this piece? What makes it special? What does it need to convey? And I let that inform how I envision it in print. Then I like to talk with any editors involved, make sure I know everything I should know and am thinking correctly about the project. Then I usually start to write ideas, words, concepts, and then start drawing pages. That translates to the computer and then eventually to the page.

How do editors and artists work closely in The New York Times?

It depends on the team and the project. I think my best projects have been because of good communication and collaboration with editors. I think every project needs to be about the story first and if you can’t work closely with an editor, you might be missing out on ways to elevate a piece in print.

Do you think AI is going to create a revolution in the field of data visualisation and information graphics?

I think it will be a great asset but not a revolutionary tool. You still need a human to evaluate certain parts of projects, be sensitive to tone and nuance. I’m also interested to see how news organizations will keep readers trust and maintain editorial excellence as they begin to use these tools.

The post Capturing One Million Deaths on a Page: A Chat with NYT’s Carrie Mifsud appeared first on Nightingale.

Street names are not neutral

You might not make much of it as you pass through Avenue Victor Hugo in Paris, Via Garibaldi in Venice, or Strada Xenofon in Bucharest. Yet once you start paying attention to it, you can’t stop wondering: Where are all the women? Why are there so many Saints and soldiers, and so few scientists, where are people of any gender, color, or culture?

What might at first have seemed like a small detail of your daily strolls gains a more profound meaning once you start systematically counting who is present and who is excluded from our toponymy. The lack of diversity in street names doesn’t just tell a story about the type of society we inherited or live in, it tells us something about the one we perpetuate. Studying street names can become a proxy to reveal hidden patterns about collective memory, societal values, and the processes of legitimization of the past.

That is why at Sheldon.studio we felt a great responsibility when OBC Transeuropa approached us to work on a large dataset of 145,933 streets across 30 major European cities in 17 different countries. What patterns would the data reveal? How could we make a broad public empathize with the topic and the massive dataset, igniting actions to demand change?

Designing a digital commons

The concept

Mapping Diversity is not the first project tackling data about gender representation in cities. For example, in Italy, where we launched the project’s first prototype, the group Toponomastica Femminile for years had compiled lists of women honored in Italian streets, alongside educational initiatives and activism to demand more women representation in the urban landscape.

At the global scale, Mapping Diversity acknowledges the impact of existing projects investigating the lack of streets honoring women, above all EqualStreetNames, Streetnomics, and Las Calles de las Mujeres.

Our first thought was, what could our studio add to such a landscape? We believed we could contribute to contextualizing the data as a “digital commons” in order to reach a wider audience beyond feminist groups, academia, or the mapping community.

Like natural commons, such as oceans and pastures, digital commons are resources that belong to all of us, that are accessible to all of us, and whose care falls on all of us. Rethinking the data about representation in toponymy as a digital common meant going beyond publishing a single data visualization or a single data journalism article. It implied creating a shared knowledge base that drew people in, got them curious about the topic, and made them interested in taking part in the ongoing debate, or even contributing actively to the project.

But how do you design a digital common?

Several screens from the scrollytelling aspect of exploring the map data

Sheldon.studio’s Translate-Relate-Enable framework

To reframe street data as a digital common, we created the Translate-Relate-Enable framework to guide our projects. Let’s see what each component is about and how it has been applied in Mapping Diversity.

Translate

While data is often public and formally accessible, it usually requires a diverse skillset to turn it into something relevant for a broad audience. Opening the (open) data is the first step of designing digital commons and refers precisely to this act of translation: from the rows and columns of a spreadsheet to the pieces of meaningful information that are relevant in everyday life.

In Mapping Diversity, we leveraged scrollytelling and the progressive disclosure of information to engagingly communicate the data. These techniques allowed us to translate complexity by breaking the information down into small chunks that are revealed gradually, with brief texts and explanations always contextualizing the numbers and chart. Thus, scrollytelling facilitates the comprehension of data to those who are graphically or statistically illiterate, or just unfamiliar with the topic.

Relate

Translating data is not enough if there is no one to listen to or care. That is why, when designing digital commons, we need to think about ways to bridge the gap between the data and the audience. For example, by providing a hook, a personalized entry point suddenly makes a vast amount of data relevant to a specific person.

Mapping Diversity provides reader-centric storytelling: before digging into the overall insights, you are invited to pick a city – perhaps where you were born, where you are living, or where you had your favorite trip. By choosing a city, you are presented only with the data about that specific place, and you can indulge in exploring the whole map of the streets you have a connection with. Additionally, the spreadsheet’s abstract numbers and data points become more relatable thanks to the inclusion of qualitative data about the women honored. Short descriptions and portraits appear as you navigate the single streets of the city or neighborhood you are exploring, further reducing the distance between the reader and the data.

Enable

Digital commons are more than knowledge repositories: once data is translated and relatable, it spurs debates and makes the audience want to contribute and engage with the topic. Digital commons provide tools that facilitate and enable the audience to act upon these desires.

In Mapping Diversity, as the reader scrolls to the end of the page, they find the shocking statistic of how few women are represented in the selected city. At this point, a button flashes and provides an easy way to quickly share the surprising insight on social media. The platform automatically generates the social media card, making it effortless for the reader to take action and populate the public sphere with data to foster an informed debate.

But access to data about the extent to which our cities exclude and marginalize certain groups of people doesn’t offer a solution on how to build a more equitable society. However, as communities around the world raise questions about what to do with cultural fossils of our past – be it tearing down statues, painting them pink, renaming or contextualizing streets – digital commons such as Mapping Diversity is a tool to facilitate an informed debate beyond niches and filter bubbles.

Nurturing a digital commons

Digital commons do not end with the publication date. The challenging part comes now, as we envision ways to bring the digital project to have an impact in the physical world. That is why in May 2023 we held the first of a series of workshops to connect local communities to the toponymy data of their city. The first pilot has been with a group of students from the Faculty of Education in Brixen, a small town in the surroundings. We explored the town’s streets, surveyed those in people’s names, discovered their stories, and created a new dataset to enrich the platform.

Students then co-created an information ecosystem to reduce the distance between citizens and tourists and Brixen’s toponymy data.  It is an approach we rely on to spread the information over several media and places, so as to maximize the impact, offering different touch points in different places and media, so as to target multiple and specific audiences.  So, in specific, a series of data-based posters welcome visitors in the city’s districts. Each poster recapitulates the profession of people whose district’s streets are dedicated to, and then offers an entry point of their faces, birth data, and sorties, opening to the qualitative side of the data. Posters are just one of the possible touchpoints. Newly designed maps suggest street names and data-based city tours. Finally, each street plate comes with a QR code that leads citizens to an informative card, connected to a fictional Instagram account of the historical figure. All those facets, are interconnected, giving rise to a systemic narration, which is not made by a single voice… by the collection of all the small fragments.

We hope the workshop is just the first step of a longer series: we are currently testing the format to develop a replicable model to enable new localized initiatives throughout Europe. Because sometimes, if data do not exist, people do not exist, and with them, the values that can inspire a more inclusive and equitable society.

List of all women found in the data set (there are many more when scrolling to the right!)

Alice Corona is a data journalist and partner of Sheldon.studio, Matteo Moretti is a designer and founding partner of Sheldon.studio

The post <strong>Who’s on the Map? Using Data to Reimagine Street Name Diversity</strong> appeared first on Nightingale.

Data has become a powerful tool for making sure that resources can be effectively channeled to communities most in need. Change-makers can use data to identify how a critical social challenge is preventing a community from opportunity. Nevertheless, with the abundance of data that is out there, raw data is no longer enough. The key is for new leaders to be able to use data visualization to shed light on growing problems so that the private, public, and non-profit sector can drive meaningful change. 

A picture is worth a thousand words

Humans struggle to understand patterns from numbers in a table. Our brains tend to see these numerals as words rather than as insights of the story that they actually represent. When this data is visualized in a graphic, however, our brains are able to much more easily quantify measures in terms of patterns and understand much more information. 

Edward Tufte’s famous example of coding information proves this point. In the table, our brains are unable to draw any meaningful insights. But when we visualize these datapoints, Tufte points out that the “Graphics reveal data. Indeed graphics can be more precise and revealing than conventional statistical computations.”

Data visualization drives decision making

The value of data visualization for decision making proved itself in 1854. The John Snow cholera map uses small bar charts on streets in London to indicate where outbreaks of cholera were appearing in the city’s center. Public health officials had been trying to understand what was causing the outbreak and previously had been unable to, until a clever data visualizer created the image below. 

The visualization helped the city realize that the households that suffered the most from cholera were all using the same well for drinking water. This was a revelation at the time. 

The city of London spent years thereafter investing in better sewage systems to prevent well contamination. The visualization is thus so powerful because it not only revealed the nucleus of an issue, it also helped drive forward a solution that would benefit communities for years to come. 

Internet access during the COVID-19 pandemic

When the COVID-19 pandemic pushed students online and caused employees to work remotely, the disparities in internet access became quickly apparent. According to the FCC, 21 million Americans and 10 million school-age children did not have internet access, and some researchers estimated that these numbers might be twice as high. 

America knew qualitatively that it had an internet access issue, but it didn’t always know quantitatively where those communities were.

At American Inequality, we published several pieces visualizing internet access and inequality in the U.S. to address this issue. We used our geospatial mapping to highlight areas that were struggling with the digital divide. We then partnered with a non-profit called No One Left Offline (NOLO) to distribute wi-fi hotspots across Oregon that had low internet access and needed support. The team heard testimonials from families sharing that, “I wouldn't have been able to connect to the internet without this support from NOLO.” 

As the Biden Administration is deploying $65 billion through the new infrastructure bill to provide high-speed internet to communities, they have explained that they plan to rely on maps like these to make data-driven decisions about where to allocate their funding. 

Opportunity mapping for better solutions

Every graph is a comparison. Geospatial graphs in particular highlight comparisons across regions. This allows decision makers to understand where to direct their efforts. 

When we see a map like the one above, our eyes may flash towards the regions in red. These are the regions that are particularly struggling with a challenge. However, businesses and policymakers should also look to the regions in blue to learn from what may be working well. This practice is called opportunity mapping.

State governments have been using this data practice for years, and it’s time to bring it to communities. Research has shown that as states increasingly struggle with the effects of climate change, state government officials are turning to other states that have been navigating these challenges for years. For example, New Jersey urban planners engaged researchers and local policymakers from Hawaii after Hurricane Sandy so that New Jersey could learn how the island nation had been navigating rising tides for decades. 

Deeper data on counties instead of states can make it easier to tailor proposals for communities. This will allow researchers and activists to build data visualizations with purpose in mind.

Analytics and impact

Data visualization is a powerful tool for making a difference. It can help change-makers understand where to direct their efforts amidst a sea of information on complex topics. 

As leaders in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors continue to use data visualizations to make decisions, the key will be to observe both what is not working as well as what is working well. Cholera maps were able to show public health officials where the issues were, but they also needed to understand where the solutions existed to maintain clear water supplies.

At American Inequality, we include a path forward in every article to suggest some of the ways that we can learn from data visualizations to improve the lives of many. The U.S. is battling against a tide of injustice in housing, healthcare, education, taxes, racism, sexism, and location turns out to be a huge driver of these disparities. Data visualization can shed light on these issues, but most importantly, it can help drive meaningful change. 

The post Mapping Inequality Can Drive Social Impact appeared first on Nightingale.

Unfold it to drape across your couch like a blanket or examine it on a table like a road map. The Temple operates as a self-documenting system to understand and memorize a world history narrative. It is a perspective rendering of a vast hall, in which time is the distance from the back wall of Creation. The wall pillars are centuries holding up time bands of ceiling labeled with categories of famous people arranged. The pillars on the right display the names of famous rulers. At the foot of the pillars world events flow towards our eye on the left while the names of battles flow forward on the right.

When Richard Saul Wurman proposed five ways to organize information, he described Time as “an easily understandable framework from which changes can be observed and comparisons made.” (Information Anxiety 2, 41). While Wurman was trained as an architect, he was not suggesting that time would be a good principle for designing a building. He had something more linear and singular in mind, a chronological chart of events, the now familiar one-dimensional timeline. 

Emma Willard had something much more ambitious in mind when she published her first perspective time chart, “Pictures of Nations or Perspective Sketch of the Course of Empire” in Atlas to Accompany a System of Universal History In 1836. The Picture of Nations is reproduced in this beautifully designed book along with the other technique Willard excelled at, the chronological series of maps. The selection is edited with extensive commentary by the historian Susan Schulten. There are pages where Willard speaks for herself, as in this quote:

Mere straight lines not wrought into a picture, and presenting no form of comeliness to the eye, are unattractive. The young (and the old too) do not feel any wish to look at them, and thus they carry away no distinct impression. They are like a succession of monotonous sounds, which no one remembers; while the arrangement of sounds in tunes, or lines in pictures, are attended to with pleasure, and easily remembered. (70)

To which Schulten adds, “Willard distinguished ‘pictures’ of information from ‘mere’ timelines in that the former added up to something greater than just the display of data.” Anyone involved in information design will agree. We can be drawn into the narrative of history as a building, of events distant in time and in space flowing towards us, of pillars and ceilings engraved with the names of famous men and a few queens, an arrangement of events we should memorize to understand the past. Willard’s work is among the Information Graphic Visionaries series because she made that leap towards the memorable. Without these innovative diagrams and history maps, her textbooks would be as invisible today as those of her more conventional male contemporaries. 

Inventing a nation in timelines

Schulten and others have written eloquently about Willard as a pioneer of women’s education. She is a representative of the first born-American generation, a unique place in the American history she chose to represent in her maps and timelines. A child of a colonial-era New England farming family—she, her students, and the readers of her textbooks were not in England anymore. They were the first citizens to define their new country’s territory and history. 

One pillar of Willard’s Temple, already a cornerstone of this new identity, was the adoption of Columbus as the starting point of American history. The first public celebration of Columbus Day was organized in 1792 by a New York political club. They embraced  the 300^th anniversary of an event that took place in the Caribbean, honoring a man who never touched or acknowledged the existence of North America as the start of a national identity. This group called themselves the Society of St. Tammany, the Sons of St. Tammany, or the Columbian Order. Tammany Societies were nativist political clubs created during the Revolutionary War to support the new republic, and Columbia became a favored term for the new nation. Tammany was a reference to Tamamend, a mythical leader of the Delaware (Lenni Lenape), and society members appropriated indigenous titles to support their sense of ‘nativeness’. From Willard’s generation onwards, American history began by counting 300 years backwards from 1792.

While Willard’s Temple design is entirely original, it is also a mashup of previous authors’ timeline techniques and metaphors. Schulten’s essay does an excellent job of explaining these predecessors and influences. I will add a few more examples and place Willard’s work conceptually along two axes: as a timeline that synchronizes sacred and profane historical ideas and as an expression of American nationalist narrative. With that in mind, let us look at what Willard built her temple from, and what she chose to include and exclude from its floor, ceiling, and pillars, as well as from her maps.

Rosenberg and Grafton begin Cartographies of Time with the questions “What does history look like? How do you draw time?” This is the wrong question to ask. Designing a timeline does not revolve around the question of what time looks like. A timeline is a narrative constructed from visual signposts. Any narrative has a beginning, middle and end. The designer must address three questions: where does time begin, what does it include and where does it end? Once these questions are answered, the appearance of time can have any form that supports the visual logic of sequence.

For the students of Willard’s Troy Female Seminary, the beginning of time had to be the date proposed by Bishop Ussher’s 17^th century analysis of the Book of Genesis, four thousand and four years before the birth of Christ. Time starts with the names of people and events in the Bible, and continues to ancient Greek and Roman texts, concluding with events remembered by modern European nations. Willard embraced this scheme and steadfastly stuck with it throughout her work. Her end of time took the shape of twenty-one modern nations grouped into four categories: Northern Europe outside the Roman Empire, Europe formed from the Roman Empire, Mahometan (Islamic), and Pagan Nations. The exception in these categories were “those of the Western Continent” included in the Roman Empire nations, the parting of the English and Iberian colonial rivers to reveal the Republic of America, Mexico and South American Republics. Given pride of place, these new creations were at the center of history.

Detail from Temple of Time poster, present time (1846) showing the Americas, Emma Willard, Maps of History, Susan Schulten, 2022

Châtelain’s 18th century method

There were other approaches to representing time that did not combine Biblical, Classical and Modern sources. Henri Abraham Châtelain made a different choice with similar material a hundred years earlier. His Atlas historique, which went through several editions in the early 1700s, was a multi-volume book of maps, lineage diagrams, and essays summarizing the European understanding of the world. Châtelain’s timeline of human history was a presentation of Church and State History side by side rather than combining them or suppressing one view for the other. His solution was simultaneity rather than synthesis. The two-page spread of the Chaine de l’histoire sacrée (Chain of sacred history) and Chaine de l’histoire prophane (Chain of profane history) share a similar time scale. Time begins using Ussher’s date for the creation of the world, though dates are labeled forwards to 4000 (our conventional Year 0) rather than backwards, then continue to 1713 (the present). The facing pages describe parallel lineages of Church history, visualizes Old Testament patriarchs and kings flowing into dead branches of Roman Jerusalem, then on to the Western and Eastern church. State history begins with Assyrian, Egyptian and Italian monarchs, along with a reference to, the Chinese empire..

Chaine de L’Histoire Sacrée : Chain De L’Histoire Prophane, Atlas historique, Tom I. No. 3. Henri Abraham Châtelain, 1718 (David Rumsey Historical Map Collection)

Châtelain was a French Huguenot minister who preached in London and Amsterdam; an artist-engraver who designed and drew many of the plates and maps included in the books he published, and essentially a person who combined sacred and profane practice in his own life. He may have had business and political reasons for omitting any reference to the Reformation in his visualization of sacred time.

Châtelain’s publications described the world by combining maps, timelines, and text. The atlas documented an interconnected world defined by European international trade and travel. While most of the globe is represented in the maps and texts, a notable exception is the interior and western coast of North America. It is worthwhile having a close look at the map that covers the same area that Willard will include in her historical map series. 

Map of Canada or New France, and the Discoveries Made There (Carte du Canada ou de la Nouvelle France, & des Découvertes qui y ont été faites) was based on the work of the cartographer Guillaume De L’Isle. It presents a view of North America gazing northwest. embracing the entire Great Lakes and upper Mississippi basin.  Most of the map is covered with the names of the indigenous nations that made up the population of Canada ou Nouvelle France. 

Detail of Carte du Canada ou de la Nouvelle France, & des Découvertes qui y ont été faites, Atlas historique, Tom VI. No. 20. Henri Abraham Châtelain, 1718 (David Rumsey Historical Map Collection)

This map of New France is not the map of a nation. De L’isle has drawn a territory in which French and English settlements were coexisting and trading with indigenous populations. In his most recent re-evaluation of North America during this period, Pekka Hämäläinen makes the argument that New France was an alliance among French settlers and indigenous nations to support extractive trade in exchange for useful technologies. “In a striking contrast to most English colonies,” he writes, “New France was built on close collaboration with the Indians, who became trading partners, military allies, and kin over the course of the seventeenth century.” (Indigenous Continent, 209) He makes a convincing case that it was the competition among the indigenous nations, fueled by intentional or unintentional European trade, rather than European imperial policies, that determined where settlements could survive. The region south of Lake Ontario in the De L’Isle map is labeled Iroquois, a label I will come back to when discussing Willard’s 1828 textbook below. The many groups and settlements shown on this French map demonstrate just how not empty North America was. Reading Hämäläinen’s historical narrative alongside Maps of History reveals how American Federalist nationalism shaped the way Willard represented European and indigenous people.

By the time Willard is making her maps and timelines, North America is not just a place in a World Atlas, it is the place where the American nation enters world history. How did this first-generation information visionary integrate her view of American history with the history of the world? Glancing back at the Temple of Time, we can see that the five pillars closest to the present on the left represent the New World. Going further back in time, these pillars are blank. “King Philip 1675” inscribed on the pillar for the 17^th century is the only trace of indigenous American culture. The inscription urges the students of Troy Female Academy to remember Metacomet, the Wampanoag military leader, renamed King Philip by the English, a reference to the son of Alexander the Great. Willard made a place for her proto-nation’s first serious military enemy, the leader who tried but failed to drive the European settlers out of New England. 

Detail from Temple of Time poster, showing significant dates on the century pillars for the Americas, Emma Willard, Maps of History, Susan Schulten, 2022

North America in charts, streams, and pillars

Willard’s representation of North America is a series of choices. We can appreciate the choices she makes by looking at similar materials in timelines by Joseph Priestley and Friedrich Strass. Priestley starts time at 1200 B.C. based on textual evidence from the Shepherd Kings, Egyptians, and Israelites. His sense of historical time is based on written texts rather than religious faith. Empires rise and fall without reference to the light of a messiah. His Unitarian theology counts down to zero at the birth of Christ marked only by a symbol –    –  and up again to 1800. All modern nations (Italy) or regions (Africa) are given a horizontal band to label their transition from one empire or kingdom to the next. In his row of empires that become the American continents, Priestley finds a place for the 13^th century founding of the Kingdom of Peru and the Empire of Mexico, so they can transition to SPANISH in the 16^th century. The other labels that make up this row are European names and nationalities. 

Detail of the Americas from A new chart of history, Joseph Priestley, 1769 (David Rumsey Historical Map Collection)

Friedrich Strass’ Der Strom der Zeiten (Streams of Time) begins time the same way Willard does. The world emerges from the clouds in 4004 and a series of cultural streams begin to flow downward to the present. The only reference to the Americas are small colonial side channels flowing into and out of the rivers of French, Spanish, Portuguese, and English history near the bottom of the chart. 

Detail of present time (1803) for the streams of Spain, Portugal, England, Der Strom der Zeiten/Streams of Time, Friedrich Strass, 1803 (David Rumsey Historical Map Collection)

The Americanness of the Temple of Time can also be seen in how Willard absorbed and modified another feature of Priestley’s system, categories of famous people. Priestley’s Chart of Biography grouped famous individuals into six categories and included 2000 names.  Statesmen and Warriors were one category. Both theological and political philosophers were grouped in Divines and Metaphysicians. He had the agenda of religious dissent and social reform behind his selection and categorization of historical figures.

Willard was set on establishing historical conventions rather than challenging them. She uses a simplified approach, with five categories and about 300 names. Europeans who claimed American territory (Columbus, Cabot, De Gama, Gilbert, Verazani [sic], Smith) are in Philosophers, Discoverers &c. Religious leaders who founded English colonies (Penn, R. Williams) are Theologians. The Spanish who took over in Central and South American nations (Cortez and Pizarro) are in Warriors. 

Schulten notes that the floor of Willard’s Temple evolved from her earlier Picture of Nations, and both can be compared to Priestley’s and Strass’ timelines. It is not surprising that these European and American timelines were Eurocentric. It is more surprising to note the non-European people and events they chose to include or omit. There is far more non-European history in Priestley’s 18^th century chart than Willard includes sixty years later. While it starts with entirely Mediterranean sources, the top third of present time in Priestley’s chart resolves into America, Africa, China, and India. He uses color to show how the Mongolian Empire included China, Persia, Turkey and Russia.

The metaphor of streams and the downward (vertical) flow of Strass’ design suggests that the present world flows from the people that emerged from Creation, a world that included the Chinese. Modern history flows from these original streams, though Strass has to add a few examples of later creation to account for German and Nordic origins. 

Willard starts with a similar set of Mediterranean sources emerging from Creation. She recognizes India and China much later than her predecessors. Their streams only appear after the light that represents the birth of Christ. The part of the floor that will become the Pagan Nations has no content until “Degama [sic] discovers India” and European trade begins. She makes chronological mistakes in Asian history, placing Jenghis Khan and Tamerlaine in the correct century on the pillars but reversing their position on the floor.

Priestley’s Africa shows six hundred years of history leading to the 18^th century North African kingdoms of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli.

Detail of showing the nations of North Africa from A new chart of history, Joseph Priestley, 1769 (David Rumsey Historical Map Collection)

Willard’s American version has no Africa per se. The Temple of Time does show Egypt and adds Barbary between Turkey and Persia. A stream emerges on the floor from the Moguls that reads, “The Two Brothers Barbarosso Found the Piratical States of Barbary”.  It ends with the text, “First brought to terms by the Americans”. This is a reference to the Barbary Wars, also remembered as “the shores of Tripoli” in the American Marine’s Hymn.  It also illustrates that one criteria for inclusion in history is warfare.

Detail from the Temple of Time showing the place of Barbary between Turkey and Persia, with text referring to the Barbary Wars.

Native Americans as barbarians that vanish and reappear

The wars between indigenous nations and the English colonies and the new United States are given more attention in her historical maps than in her timelines.  She sets the stage with a map that presents the area that would become the United States before European settlements: Locations and Wanderings of the Aboriginal Tribes.

What was this image based on and what purpose did it serve? Willard was an educator and a writer of history books, not a proto-ethnographer. Schulten’s essay, “A Graphic Mind”, provides an answer. Before creating her History of the United States, Willard published her Ancient Atlas, a book of maps to support the teaching of Mediterranean/European history. “The most interesting of these was the map of barbarian invasions, which collapsed centuries of migration across Europe onto a single image,” Schulten writes. She points out that the map, titled Migrations, Settlements &c. of Barbarous Tribes, was adapted from the 1820 American edition of the Lesage Atlas. That map, titled Invasion of the Barbarians their origin, settlements, dispersion, &c., illustrates a text that summarizes the movement of tribes invading the Western Roman Empire from the 4^th century. The map shows groups from Scandinavia, Central Asia, and North Africa tracing colorful lines across Europe.

Left: Detail of Iberia from Geographical and Historical Map of the Incursions of the Barbarians, Incursion of the Barbarians, their origin, settlements, dispersion, &c., A Complete Genealogical, Historical, Chronological, And Geographical Atlas; Being A General Guide To History, Both Ancient And Modern … According To The Plan Of Le Sage, Greatly Improved. The Whole Forming A Complete System Of History And Geography. 1820 (David Rumsey Historical Map Collection). Right: Detail of Ibera from Map No, VI, Migrations, Settlements &c. of barbarous Tribes illustrating the account which is given of them in Willard’s Ancient Geography, Ancient Atlas to Accompany Universal Geography, Emma Willard, 1827. (David Rumsey Historical Map Collection). 

A look at migrations across the Iberian peninsula in both of these maps shows how Willard simplified the visual language introduced in Lesage. She removes much of the geographic detail and adds directional arrows. She employed the same visual language in her Locations and Wanderings map to suggest the changing location of indigenous groups before and during the English colonial period. In the context of Ancient History, the movement of these tribes was a disruption of the Roman Imperial order, until ultimately Burgundians founded Burgundy, Lombards settled Lombardy, and Normans built up the same sites they had looted and burned in Normandy. 

Detail of Introductory Map To Accompany Willard’s History Of The United States, Locations and Wanderings of the Aboriginal Tribes, A Series of Maps to Willard’s History of the United States, Or, Republic Of America. 1829. (David Rumsey Historical Map Collection)

For the historical atlas of America, she starts with a chapter describing theories of how people arrived in the Americas (across the Bering Strait, up the Mississippi river network) and another that enumerates “the Principal Indian Confederacies as found by European Discoverers.” The visualization for this section is analogous to the wanderings of Old World barbarians. Surrounded by oval labels that claim no territory, these tribes are neither kingdoms or states. The invading arrows of Iroquois or Five Nations project southwards into Irocoisia Proper. The Tuscaroras move from south to north while the Lenni Lenape move from east to west, and the Shawanese wander from upper Florida to the Ohio River network. The movement of the confederacies introduces their anticipated transient role in American history. 

In the maps accompanying Part 1 of her four-part chronology, all indigenous nations vanish from the interior. Her maps focus on the thin strips of coastline and rivers that made up the English colonial world. Indigenous people reappear as insets labeled Places Mentioned in the History of the Pequod War in the Third Map of 1643 and Places Mentioned in the History of King Philip’s War in the Fourth Map of 1692. The educational value is memorizing the names of the combatants and locations of the wars that traumatized the English colonies. The Fifth Map of 1755 shows the names of the indigenous people who controlled the interior of the southern colonies—Tuscarora, Cawataba, Congaree, Yamasee, Cherokee, and Apalachee—but the area west of the coastal rivers remains empty. It is only in the Sixth Map of 1765 that she actually includes an indigenous nation with territory, the Country of the Six Nations. Here she acknowledges that before the American Revolution the Iroquois Confederacy controlled all of what is now New York State west of the Hudson Valley.

Detail of Sixth Map or Map Of 1763 showing Iroquois territory before the American Revolution. (David Rumsey Historical Map Collection)

The Appearance of the American Far West

In the Ninth Map of 1826, referred to in the History as the Map of the Present Day, many of the previously excluded nations represented in the De L’Isle map of New France reappear. Her introductory map showed the unwandering people of the southeast—Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek. In 1826 they were still in their towns, but the Indian Removal Act of 1830 is about to expel them from the newly created states of Mississippi and Alabama. The other prehistoric wandering tribes are gone, replaced by people who have been engaged with French and British colonial trade for generations, now framed inside recently created American states. Illinois is land “ceded by the Kaskaskias” and Arkansas is “part of the tract ceded by the Quapaws”.

Ninth Map or Map of 1826, A Series of Maps to Willard’s History of the United States, Or, Republic Of America. 1829. (David Rumsey Historical Map Collection)

But the most interesting detail of the Map of 1826 is the depiction of the Far West in the upper left. The North West Territory is labeled, Those lands possessed in common by the Sioux, Chippewas, Winnebago, and Sauks, an assertion that would have been news to the people who lived there. The western boundary of this territory is the upper Mississippi.

Beyond that is a space with no boundaries labeled Sioux Indians or Naudowessies. It was into that blank space that George Catlin went to seek his fortune in 1830. Catlin, born in 1796, was twelve years younger than Emma Willard, but it is still fair to describe him as being of that same born-American generation. His family background was similar to Willard’s, with farm family roots in Connecticut. When the young Catlin was sent by his father to study and practice law in Litchfield, Connecticut, Willard was already married and establishing schools for girls in Middlebury, Vermont. By the time Willard moved her school operations to New York state, Catlin had abandoned law to become a painter in Philadelphia. They crossed patrons when Catlin was commissioned to paint a portrait of DeWitt Clinton, the governor whose policies and support attracted Willard to settle in New York. 

Catlin spent six years traveling back and forth to areas west of America’s borders. He completed the first part of his project to paint hundreds of oil paintings of indigenous people and gather a huge collection of material objects. The second part of his plan was to become rich and famous by presenting his work as a public spectacle. Before opening his Indian Gallery in New York City in 1837, he staged a preview exhibit of paintings in Albany and Troy where Willard was a successful textbook author and pioneer of women’s education. There is no indication that she took this opportunity to see Catlin’s show.

I bring up Catlin because of another map, the Outline Map of Indian Localities in 1833. Catlin drew this for his most famous book, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Conditions of the North American Indian. That book was illustrated with engravings from his paintings and published in England after he packed up his collection to tour Europe in the 1840s, the same period when Willard was creating her timelines. Catlin drew this map from his travel notes and stories he collected. Here we finally see North America, undivided by northern and southern boundaries. We see the Great Plains, the Great Basin, and the Pacific Coast not yet separated into territories or states. We can see the buffalo ranges tracking the river networks and the names of the people who lived there.

Outline Map of Indian Localities in 1833, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians, George Catlin, 1842 (North Carolina Digital Collections)

If we place this map of our continent—and not the entire continent, of course, but merely that part we think of as southern Canada, the United States, and a bit of Mexico, omitting the inconvenience of Florida and the Caribbean—beside Willard’s world of 1826, we see how little of the continent was included in that early 19^th century version of American History. 

The visual power of one chart and one map

My comparisons touch on only a select few of the maps and diagrams reproduced in Maps of History. The book includes maps that depict world history, including a series that are adapted from the original work by Edward Quin. It was Quin who created the metaphor of parting clouds to reveal the parts of the globe included in world history. Willard copied this visualization of world history expanding from the Middle East to include Mediterranean Europe, Asia and Africa, and finally the globe including the Americas, adapting Quin’s design into a simpler series of maps. 

The book also reproduces two more ‘chronographer’ diagrams, a name meant to convey a combination of chronology (time) and geography (location). Following the initial Temple or Map of Time (1846), she designed Willard’s English Chronographer (1849), a building with far more detail on its walls, ceiling, and floor than the original temple, with a ceiling that included a new category of Memorable Women. The Chronographer of Ancient History (1851) was the last of these diagrams. It provided more detail for the period between creation and the birth of Christ. All are beautifully reproduced with helpful commentary.

Schulten’s essay and commentary emphasizes how Willard’s designs were meant to communicate the relationships between time and space. She quotes Willard as proudly claiming to have designed diagrams where “time is measured by space, and all time since creation of the world is indicated at once to the eye.”  

The timelines and maps clearly show how Willard was an inventive organizer and educator. Yet her building metaphor, a memory palace in which she selected and placed details for her students to remember, was as divorced from representations of geographic space as Priestley’s parallel rows or Strass’ parallel streams. It was memorable, it was orderly, but it could not simultaneously convey chronology and the relative geography of the Barbary Coast, Persia, and China.

Châtelain and Priestley shared with Willard the same goal of communicating and educating through the strength of our visual channel. In his preface to the Atlas historique, Châtelain wrote: 

La Carte est un secours que l’on fournit par les yeux à l’imagination, sauf à l’entendement après cela d’en faire son profit. (The map is assistance provided by the eye to the imagination, so that our understanding can profit by it.) 

Priestley also had enormous faith in his diagram’s power of communication. Though he wrote many books, he was convinced that visualization was superior to the text for transferring knowledge. In the booklet that accompanied his New Chart of History, he wrote:

If a person carries his eyes horizontally, he sees, in very short time, all the revolutions that have taken place in any particular country, and under whose power it is at present; and this is done with more exactness, and in much less time, than it could have been done by reading. 

Willard clearly inherits this faith in visual communication. The essays and reproductions in Maps of History help the reader appreciate her invention, the breadth of her adaptation, and the ways she viewed history and geography as a single subject. We can also see the choices she made to shape and populate her diagrams and maps. 

The last map Schulten reproduces is a map of an America we are more familiar with today than the New France of 1700 or the twenty-three American states of the 1820s. The United States of America, Historically and Chronologically Divided into Eight Parts is from Last Leaves of American History, a later textbook published in 1853. It shows America from sea to shining sea, covering the same continent that Catlin drew. 

United States of America Historically and Chronologically divided into Eight Parts, Last leaves of American history: comprising a separate history of California, Emma Willard, 1853. (Library of Congress)

Schulten’s commentary on this map provides an important point about Willard’s legacy as an information graphic visionary.

Today, the map appears ordinary, for it has been adapted as one of the central maps of American history textbooks even down to our own day. Indeed, that it has become a fixture of our national history demonstrates its symbolic power. Willard’s lasting contribution was to offer a graphic vision of Manifest Destiny that normalized the nation’s growth and gave it an almost natural, inevitable quality. The continental map includes very little information beyond the sequential parcels across the continent, even erasing any detail from neighboring nations and setting the United States apart in space. American schoolchildren have for generations seen their national expansion as relatively devoid of division or violence. Yet, ironically, it was these far western acquisitions that provoked the sectional animosity of the 1850s, which devolved into the Civil War in 1861. (220-221)

Willard saw the value in images that are simple and easy to remember. The nation is complete, with a top and a bottom, a left and a right, made of parts assembled by charter, treaty, purchase, and decree. This map includes the details we should remember and excludes the complications we don’t need to discuss. 

The decision of what to include and exclude in maps and diagrams is the responsibility of the information designer. The responsibility of the viewer is to recognize that every diagram, every map, is designed from a specific point of view. Maps of History make it possible to admire Willard’s accomplishments and take a critical look at her depiction of American history and America’s place in the history of the world. The contemporary reader can note how many of her choices are still with us in the way we view our present space and time.

The post Inclusion and Exclusion in Emma Willard, Maps of History appeared first on Nightingale.

Which are the most livable cities on Earth?

Year after year, numerous rankings are published based on which cities are the most livable, with  Western Europe, Canada, and Australia usually topping these lists. These lists try to factor in as many aspects as possible, from public transport to healthcare and urban health. As they intend to be very general,it might very well happen that for certain individuals, even myself, the personalized top list would look different. Diving into this debate may be above my paygrade, so instead, I collected six different rankings credible enough to be included in the City quality of life indices article on Wikipedia.

The lists included in this collection are the following: the ​​Deutsche Bank Liveability Survey, Global Finance’s World’s Best Cities to Live, Mercer’s Quality of Living Ranking, Monocle’s Quality of Life Survey, Numbeo’s Quality of Life Ranking, and The Economist Intelligence Unit’s. All these lists capture somewhat different angles of livability, yet they also show quite some similarities. Aiming at the most generic list of cities possible, I merged them all and picked those cities that were included in at least two of them – which was  twelve cities total.

Turns out Zurich is the most popular one here – it appeared on five of the six lists, followed by a tie between Vienna and Copenhagen as each made it to four rankings. Next comes Vancouver, Melbourne, and Sydney which all made it to three of the top lists. Finally, Geneva, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Tokyo, and Wellington were all double-listed. In the later part of this article, I will refer to these twelve cities as the most livable cities (according to the merged rankings of different but professional opinions).

A color palette from the AI

During the past several weeks, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has been making huge waves in countless domains from AI research to copywriting. As my background is as far from design as Physics, I am not a natural talent with color pallets and such, so instead decided to shoot my shot and ask a few questions from the chatbot like this:

me:
Give me please a color palette of 12 pairs of colors which include the pairs of CherryRed and OffWhite, Coral and Yellow, and BubblegumPink and CherryRed when the colors are ordered based on the primary colors.

chatbot:

Sure, here is a color palette of 12 pairs of colors that include the pairs of Cherry Red and Off White, Coral and Yellow, and Bubblegum Pink and Cherry Red, ordered based on the primary colors:

Cherry Red (#ff0000) and Off White (#f5f5f5)
Coral (#ff7f50) and Yellow (#ffff00)
bubblegum Pink (#ffc0cb) and Cherry Red (#ff0000)
Red-Orange (#ff4500) and Lime Green (#32cd32)
Orange (#ffa500) and Green (#00ff00)
Lime Green (#32cd32) and Turquoise (#40e0d0)
Green (#00ff00) and Blue (#0000ff)
Turquoise (#40e0d0) and Purple (#6600ff)
Blue (#0000ff) and Off White (#f5f5f5)
Purple (#6600ff) and Coral (#ff7f50)
Off White (#f5f5f5) and bubblegum Pink (#ffc0cb)
Coral (#ff7f50) and Cherry Red (#ff0000)

As a reminder, keep in mind that color palettes often depend on the context, the purpose, and the medium where you will use them. Also, this ordering is based on the traditional primary colors but it is not always the case, some palettes could be organize differently.

After receiving a detailed answer in a blink of an eye, ChatGPT even bothered to give me a kind reminder – how thoughtful! After a few different versions of these questions, I ended up settling with two color palettes which I manually merged. The main reason I had to do that was to increase the background-foreground contrast, as the diagrams I have here really need that. While for human eyes, these contrast ratios are probably quite intuitive, it still seemed to be too challenging to properly explain it to the AI – for now.

Finally, Figure 1 shows the pairs of colors generated and matched by the AI, and organized by me. 

Urban network visualization

Visualizing and studying urban networks, such as the road network of cities, is a crucial point in numerous spatial data science applications. It comes up in any transportation-related issue from traffic jam forecasting to public transport reconstruction or micro-mobility station localizations and has a major role in accessibility and achieving 15-minute walkable cities as well. Also, they look cool and it’s fun to work with them!

So first, I went for my go-to tool, OSMnx, a Python package that combines the most widely used network science package (NetworkX) and the 101 of spatial data in Python (GeoPandas) by allowing us to download, manipulate, and analyze geospatial data from OpenStreetMap fairly easy.

One of the intro-level functionalities is to download the road network of a specified geometry, such as the administrative boundary of a city. To test out how things work, I used my hometown, an indeed small town of about 10k people in the countryside of Hungary – Siklós. Sikós both has a nice castle and an interesting road network, so the only thing I had left was to combine this network data with the color palette I co-created. Hence, I visualized the inner part of the city, a circle around its centroid with a radius of 1.3km. Additionally, I only used Python, specifically, Matplotlib to create these maps.

Top cities visualized

Finally, I created a gallery of the top twelve most livable cities based on the joint ranking, each visualized using the AI-generated color pairings on the following figures.

The post Livable cities’ urban networks appeared first on Nightingale.

Il est assez commun de repérer des formes dans les nuages, en laissant divaguer son imagination. Cela porte même un nom : on appelle ça de la paréidolie, c’est-à-dire le fait de plaquer des formes connues sur des images abstraites. Des nuages, mais aussi des taches, des flaques d’eau, bref toutes sortes de formes, un peu comme les gens qui voient le visage du Christ sur un toast. Mais moi, mon truc, ce sont les cartes.

Depuis, je cherche les cartes partout, dans les assiettes au restaurant, dans les taches de cafés laissées au fond de la tasse, sur des murs dont la peinture s’écaille ou des carrelages abîmés. Je traque les accidents cartographiques et ma collection s’agrandit au fil du temps. Je trouve qu’il y a quelque chose de beau et poétique dans cet emboîtement d’échelles. Trouver le très grand dans le très petit par exemple, comme ce minuscule pétale en forme d’Amérique du Sud. Trouver une minuscule Russie sur le rebord d’une fenêtre, ou un gigantesque Canada dans un nuage qui occupe tout le ciel. 

Cette cartographie accidentelle permet aussi de brouiller les frontières et de rapprocher les espaces. Trouver le Maroc lors d’un voyage en Espagne. Le Niger lors d’une virée à Venise. Le continent africain qui se découpe dans le ciel des Pouilles. C’est une mise en abyme cartographique qui se met en place quand on découvre des #thingsMap en voyage à l’étranger. Et quand j’en repère une sur le chemin du travail, ou lors d’une pause ou d’un déjeuner, c’est du voyage pour pas cher.

Je marche désormais les yeux rivés au sol, ou perdus dans les nuages. Je regarde machinalement chaque tache, chaque motif sur les fauteuils du métro en espérant y trouver des cartes. Ça peut être un pays, une région, un continent entier ou simplement la forme d’une ville. C’est un atlas mental et accidentel.

You can still order your own copies of Nightingale Magazine, Issues 1 and 2 here, while supplies last!

The post ThingsMap appeared first on Nightingale.

Southern Water was handed a record fine of £90 million in July 2021 after pleading guilty to illegally discharging sewage along the rivers and coastline of Kent, Hampshire, and Sussex. More than a year later, the headlines have not improved for Britain’s embattled water companies who have recently discharged more sewage close to dozens of beaches.

The Environment Agency has called on water company executives to face jail due to the ongoing failings on environmental performance. And with the onset of drought, complaints about leaky water pipes have gone from a trickle to a stream.

Maps by conservation organisation The Rivers Trust and campaign group Surfers Against Sewage lay bare the extent of sewage dumping into rivers and the sea. They have proved to be a highly effective tool, not just to warn of the risks to bathers but also to provide evidence of environmental damage.

These maps pull together data from sensors along the sewage network that detect discharges, making it clear where the worst offenders are and encouraging users to contact their local MP requesting more rapid action on sewage discharge. They are easy to share on social media and on local news sites, they have inspired viral tweets and they make for awkward viewing for the water companies themselves.

This is not the first time maps have been used to hold private water companies to account. Some of the most famous maps of mid-19th century London, when it was gripped by successive outbreaks of cholera, helped reveal the cause of the deadly illness and identify the water companies responsible.

Deadly supply

John Snow was a renowned physician who walked the streets of London during the 1854 cholera epidemic, recording the deaths in grim detail. He mapped the cases, revealing clusters around a communal water pump in Broad Street, Soho, which confirmed his theory that cholera came from dirty water. He duly removed the pump handle, the outbreak in that area stopped and the rest – as they say – is history.

At least, that’s the simple version many people are already familiar with. In fact, the story is much more complex because Snow’s theory that the cholera pathogen was waterborne was not accepted by most scientists or policymakers at the time. He needed more proof. Snow therefore devised a “grand experiment”, which hinged on the way different areas of London were served by different water companies. This meant he could compare one supplier against another in a kind of natural experiment. Snow knew that cases of cholera were not randomly distributed across the city. As he showed in Soho, they tended to be grouped together. So what if some water companies had more cases than others?

Snow mapped out where Londoners were being supplied by the Southwark & Vauxhall Company (blue-green) and by the Lambeth Company (red, while brown areas are a mixture of both) during the same epidemic. Lambeth had recently stopped drawing its water from the Thames, which was hugely polluted at the time as it was the main route for sewage to leave London. Its customers were dying from cholera at a rate of 37 per 10,000. Meanwhile, Southwark & Vauxhall was still extracting the polluted water, and their customers were dying at a rate of 317 per 10,000.

This should have proved once and for all that cholera was spreading thanks to foul water supplied into Londoners’ homes. But it wasn’t emphatic enough to trigger decisive change. Worse, a government report in 1856 commended the “considerable improvement which had taken place in the … supply of the water to the Metropolis”.

A decade later, and eight years after Snow’s death, London was suffering another cholera outbreak. The man charged with finding its cause during the summer of 1866 was William Farr, a statistician who had criticised Snow’s ideas. Even so, Farr was struck by how concentrated the cases appeared to be in East London and his mind must have turned to Snow’s grand experiment.

By mapping the cases, Farr showed that they fitted neatly within the area served by the East London Waterworks Company. Inhabitants of the area were complaining about the quality of their water, with some even finding eels in their pipes. A representative of the company wrote to the Times newspaper reassuring customers that “not a drop of unfiltered water has been supplied”.

But in his report, Farr found that in July of 1866 water levels were running low so a sluice was opened to allow homes to be supplied by stagnant water from a reservoir that the company had said was no longer in use (because the water within it had not been filtered). Farr was finally convinced that Snow had been right about the origins of cholera, and his map offered irrefutable evidence that East London Waterworks was guilty of supplying water that had caused the deaths of nearly 6,000 Londoners. It was to be London’s last cholera outbreak.

The power of maps

The maps of Snow and Farr were essential for guiding reforms that won better sanitary conditions in the growing city. Today, we live in an era where maps are created from data that they could only dream of, allowing us to see the national picture in real-time and pinpoint who is pouring the most effluent into our streams. For the Victorians, the fight for safe drinking water was a matter of life and death, but we too can use maps to make the case for a cleaner environment.

As I look at today’s maps of sewage discharges I can’t help but think of a letter the influential scientist Michael Faraday wrote to the Times in the summer of 1855, where he sets out his concerns about the dire state of the Thames after a boat trip along it:

I have thought it a duty to record these facts, that they may be brought to the attention of those who exercise power or have responsibility in relation to the condition of our river … If we neglect this subject, we cannot expect to do so with impunity; nor ought we to be surprised if, ‘ere many years are over, a hot season give us sad proof of the folly of our carelessness.

The post Sewage Alerts: The Long History of Using Maps to Hold Water Companies to Account appeared first on Nightingale.

Claire Santoro: You recently created a set of maps for the organization Possible showing noise pollution in three cities, Paris, London, and New York. One of the most interesting aspects of these maps is that they don’t just visualize sound levels, but also sonify them. Can you tell us how this project came to be?

Karim Douïeb: According to the World Health Organization, noise pollution is one of the biggest threats to environmental health in Europe. And according to the European Environment Agency, noise is estimated to contribute to 48,000 new cases of heart disease and 12,000 premature deaths every year in Europe alone. 

A lot of people are surprised by these facts, so I asked myself how I could bring more awareness to this health issue. Since I am always eager to design data-driven experiments, I prototyped an interactive and sonified map and posted it on Twitter. This experiment resonated well with the Car Free Cities project of Possible, a charity that enables people to take practical action on climate change. One of their members, Duncan Geere, reached out to me and asked if I was interested in adapting my map to the three main cities of their initiative. And this is how the project came to be.    

CS: As you noted, the project was inspired by one of your previous visualizations mapping sound levels in Brussels. How did you originally come up with the idea of trying to map the data both visually and with sound? What makes this representation so effective?

KD: Classical colored maps don’t do enough justice to the research published in static noise reports. I wanted to make the noise data more tangible and leverage this type of research by improving its impact. I couldn’t think of a better and simpler way than using sounds to explain a situation about noise. 

I wasn’t sure this sort of experiment would work for a large audience, so it was a pleasant surprise to see how well it has. I guess the reasons are many: 

• Interactive visuals are generally more engaging than static images. 
• Usage of city sounds at various levels of intensity make the experience straightforward. You directly understand that we are talking about noise.
• The experience is personalized. You explore the cities, find your neighborhood or places you have been in the past, and realize how noisy they are compared to other parts of the cities.

CS: What was most challenging about creating the Noisy Cities maps? What constraints did you face?

KD: The technical implementation was pretty simple; there were no major difficulties there. The main challenge was to retrieve comparable noise-level data for each of the cities of Paris, London, and New York. Unfortunately, that didn’t exist, so we had to work with what was available. For instance, London makes available only the minimum data required by the European environmental noise directive, i.e., noise levels for main roads only. Also, metrics and modeling conventions between the USA and Europe are slightly different, which makes comparison difficult. Data quality and data harmonization is often a struggle in this kind of project. 

CS: From a practical perspective, how did you make the maps? What data did you start with, and how did you incorporate sound? 

KD: I used QGIS (a free and open-source geographic information system software) to edit, style, and uniformize the different noise maps. These maps are then served to the application using Mapbox, which also allows the reader to interact with the map and provides the street name overlay. The web application is built with the javascript framework React. The noise comes from a looping mp3 mixing various city sound recordings. The library react-audio-player was used to programmatically control the volume based on user interactions with the map.

CS: Let’s talk more generally about your background. What types of data or data visualization projects do you typically work on? What tools do you typically use?

KD: My background lies in academia. I hold a PhD in computer science in the domain of data structure. I became interested in dataviz more than 10 years ago when I discovered Protoviz, the precursor of D3.js. Since then data visualization has always been part of my workflow and is an important aspect of the work we do at Jetpack.AI, a data science company based in Brussels that I co-founded five years ago. We conceive and design tailor-made applications that aim to improve the operational process of a wide variety of clients and industries. 

My tools of choice are D3.js, Mapbox.gl, Three.js, ObservableHQ, React and Svelte.

CS: What tips would you give to aspiring data visualizers?

KD: Visualize as many things as you can. Start with small, manageable side projects. You should aim at learning one new thing for each of these projects. Don’t focus too much on perfecting the end result, and share your prototypes, experiments, and works in progress with the dataviz community. That’s probably how I gather the best tips and recommendations to improve my skills. And always cite your sources and inspirations.

The post Noisy Cities: Behind the Scenes with Karim Douïeb appeared first on Nightingale.

Each district appears as a simplified “blob” representing specific use types. Blue dots mark out the main shopping streets with town halls marked with larger red dots. The only recognizable feature is the River Thames and associated waterways which snake horizontally across the map. Let’s take a closer look.

Seeing the bigger picture

London is an ancient city, established in 43 AD as “Londinium.” As the city outgrew its original Roman walls circa 950 AD, it rapidly expanded until it was the largest town in England by the 11th century. By 1605 London had 225,000 people–growing ultimately to its largest population of 8.6 million in 1939 . 

Then came WWII. England was systematically bombed by the Luftwaffe starting on September 7th, 1940 for 56 out of the following 57 days and nights. The German airforce dropped more than 18,000 tons of bombs on London, killing more than 40,000 English civilians, almost half of them in the capital city. More than two million houses in London were destroyed or damaged in what was to be called “the Blitz.” The trauma would cast a shadow over the character of the British people for generations. 

“The broad plan is complete, it must be translated into action”

London was never truly planned. Its growth was organic and its 18th-century streets were cramped. The rapid industrialization of the 18th and 19th centuries created some of the worst living conditions ever recorded. 

The Blitz worked counter to German plans and galvanized the British public to endure, fight, and overcome. It was in this spirit that Abercrombie’s Great London Plan was hatched to address five main issues at the time: 

1. Population growth
2. Housing
3. Employment and industry
4. Recreation
5. Transport

Author Sam Hind remarks, “… at varying scales, Abercrombie’s plans designed to foster a new type of urbanism. One borne out of the ensuing post-war virtues of order and dignity. As the map shows, Abercrombie’s vision was centered around new towns. These multiple city blobs, resembling spores on a petri dish, were designed to redistribute meaningful, livable space in and around the fringes of the densely built ‘City’ and West End areas.”

To support their plan, both Abercrombie and JH Forshaw described their ideas in a film produced in 1946 by the Ministry of Information called The Proud City (A Plan for London). The film itself is a polished introduction to the plan with plenty of optimistically montaged shots of everyday life, paired with urban planners, architects, and designers in white lab coats fervently drafting the future. The film must have been quite progressive for the time by using stop-motion animation techniques to show the history of the city and proposed interventions.

About halfway through the film, as the various talking heads walk through the plan, Ambercrombie shifts his attention from the various architectural models to a huge version of this map. (Personal aside – OMG, where is the original? Does anyone know?) He uses it as a way to show the relationship of all the communities as they relate to the overall plan. Ambercrombie explains that this map helps to integrate the Greater London Plan as a whole in order to “make life better and pleasanter for all of us.”

You can watch the newly restored film here:

“All things are ready if our minds be so”

This quote from the bard graces the introduction to the 1944 version of the Greater London Plan, and with it, the best mindset for all great dataviz experiences.

The Greater London Plan was only partially adopted in the end, as the complexities of the reconstruction outflanked Abercrombie and the best urban planners in England. While developers were not convinced (or required) to enact the plan, the project was popular enough to help define post-war optimism. Opportunities to provide better communication and transportation systems for the city center were not acted upon, but the groundwork for urban renewal (especially by the river) and suburban development helped create the London of today.

But why do I love the map?  Well, I’m a sucker for complex systems on a vast scale. This map is a perfect blend of optimism, diagrammatic speculation, and utopian idealism. It is unusual enough to demand your attention and friendly enough to help you see the bigger message. What’s not to like?

Here are some images from the book version. 

The post Patrick Abercrombie’s “The Greater London Plan” appeared first on Nightingale.