Digging Up the Nineteenth-Century Roots of Thematic Map Techniques | The New York Public Library
▻https://www.nypl.org/blog/2016/12/14/digging-nineteenth-century-roots-thematic-map-techniques
The mission of my Short-Term Fellowship was to research the development of thematic map technique in the West: the way that proportional circle, flow line, isopleth, choropleth, dasymetric, dot density, and cartogram techniques were invented and developed in Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century.
Atlas Geographique Alexander von Humboldt, Atlas Géographique et Physique du Royaume de la Nouvelle-Espagne, 1811. Paris: F. Schoell. ; p. 19
When I told friends and family about my project, there would be a pause, followed by either a confused search for a response ("Oh. Umm?") or a swift segue back to normal topics ("Huh. So, where are you staying?"). Hovering in the air between us was an incredulous elephant: this is how she spent the gift of four weeks in the Map Room, where masterpieces of cartography from across the centuries, elsewhere protected beyond the credentialed gates of private research libraries, are here available for public consultation? Instead of communing with maps from Joan Blaeu’s seventeenth century masterpiece, the Atlas mayor, she chose to leaf through yellowed, crumbling international statistical congress proceedings and the dusty annual reports of departments of public works, in search of black-and-white foldout maps and line diagrams?
Yes, and it was glorious.