Viewing the Details of "America Its History" (sic)
A post on Tangible Books instagram showed that they had got in a copy of Picturing America: The Golden Age of Pictorial Maps, and so I ran over and bought it. I’ve been looking through it. You can click here for much of its contents in the form of an Hornsby-curated exhibition now archived on the Osher Map Library’s site, along with many amazing scans & info from Hornsby’s book.
I keep coming back to this, in the book, a frustratingly small reproduction of a map by Aaron Bohrod, Aaron Bohrod’s America Its History, from 1946. I posted about the book on my instagram feed here. Looking around the internet to find a better version, I came across these links. You can click around and zoom in on the map and see the amazing details, even though the lighting and color isn’t so hot. I’m still looking around for better scans/pics.
Aaron Bohrod is a new character to me. Wikip. says “Bohrod was born in Chicago in 1907, the son of an emigree Bessarabian-Jewish grocer.[6] Bohrod studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League of New York between 1926 and 1930.[2]” (Pictorial History was published by UChicago Press, another Chicago connection. Now that I’m in Chicago is it strange how the universe keeps showing me more and more Chicago, everything connected and nearby? The fire below in the detail is striking.)
I’ll look more into this and try to find a better scan/pic and update this post.
Postcard from: Diagrams
Epistemology Charts
Defense Charts yesterday, this today.
Hired Thought is an amazing name. One problem with “biz.viz” graphics (peace to my friends still in the trenches) is how immediately out-of-date they often look, like immediately. The out-of-date-ness combines with something that I’m still trying to come up with a good name for—lack of a sense of humor is close, but not exactly it…earnestness+complexity—where the result is really funny to me. I hesitate to write about it, because believe me I sympathize. If the tweet embeds correctly, you can see some people involved…Headshots are also tricky. Best go with bald and glasses, like some sci-fi-lite feel, the “brainiac-cyborg-you-can-trust”. Avoid anything like “Big Daddy Slides” or “Cool Chart Guy.com.”
Defense Charts
For laughing/crying and Thinking about America, as well as infographics fans: Twitter account @DefenseCharts
G5-G6
Nightmare
New Book - Structures
Mirrors of Nature
Visualization and Cognition
NEW BOOKS: Pocket Guides
Trees of Life (2/2)
Trees of Life (1 of 2)
"…the so called quinarian approach to classification that was embodied in the work of British entomologist named William Sharpe Macleay (1792-1840) but taken up almost immediately by others, principally Nicholas Aylward Vigors (1787-1840) and William Swainson (1789-1855) during the 1820s and 30s. They somehow came to believe that living things existed in natural groups of five, that such groups of five are naturally divisible into five subgroups, each subgroup into five sub-subgroups, and so on. Affinities among taxa formed circular chains…Quinarians were also convinced that similarities between taxa based on affinity as well as analogy could be indicated in the same diagram…"
The questionable pattern I see reminds me of this post at waggish, the part about Fludd vs. Kepler:
“I too play with symbols and have planned a little work, Geometric Cabala, which is about the Ideas of natural things in geometry; but I play in such a way that I do not forget that I am playing. For nothing is proved by symbols; things already known are merely fitted [to them]; unless by sure reasons it can be demonstrated that they are not merely symbolic but are descriptions of the ways in which the two things are connected and of the causes of these connections.” (Kepler)
Fig. 7.7
Hard to Concentric
exercise
Timelines
A bundle of beautiful timelines posted over at the Dave Rumsey Map Collection. Many of these are featured and discussed in Cartographies of Time, one of my favorite books I read last year.
Making timelines* seems to be one of those things that we can do on computers very easily now, using gestures and drag-and-drop, instead of the nightmare interface of something like this.
I wanted to add some more to this post, so here's some other TIMELINE links that I came across in about 10 minutes of searching. I haven't done in-depth research or anything. Also -- if you're searching for "timeline" on google you'll want to add "-facebook," to filter out a billion mentions of Facebook's (badly designed) timeline feature.
BeeDocs Timeline App
Verite Timeline App (play with the coal industry power play timeline)
SIMILE Timeline Widget
Tiki-Toki
ChronoZoom Project
Wikipedia list of timelines
Hyperhistory (oldstyle, charming)
Add more in comments if you want. There's gotta be some huge, Wikipedia-type timeline somewhere on the web, right? I thought I saw something like that once, but I couldn't find it just now.
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*...and mindmaps, 3D environments, nested documents, etc....
UPDATES:
Here's an interactive timeline thing called "Here is Today."