viz. - Maps

"Maybe These Maps Are Legends": Ghost Signs and the Traces of the Past

Jake Ptacek — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 14:00:40 +0000

Austin, TX, Ghost Sign, image from Flickr

There is nothing in heaven above, in the earth beneath, in the water, or in the air we breathe but will be found in the universal Language of the Walls. ("The Language of the Walls," anonymous, 1855).

Maps are propositions as well as indexes, making visual arguments about our orientation in this world--a good map (whether road or otherwise) gets us somewhere, forces us to reconsider the relationship between us and the world. Advertising, that pernicious beasat, is also somewhere between sign and proposition. A visual referent to a thing--a bottle of beer, a pack of gum, an insurance service--an advertisement also makes an argument or, at the very least, presents a fantasy of (self-)orientation. But what happens when those relationships are obscured, when the fantasy becomes outdated? What happens when the ad remains after the product is gone?

Image, John Orlando Parry, "A London Street Scene," 1835 from Wikimedia Commons

Advertising really becomes a science and a spectacle under the Victorians, who understood (and saw the signs of) the radically changing nature of capitalism. victorians pioneered advertising on the walls, as the sardonically frustrated narrator of "The Language of the Walls" notes. Advertising thus became a kind of "commodification of public space", as Sam Roberts and Sebastian Groes call it; an intrusion that we now take for granted began as a visual index of the transformation of public culture.

Galveston, TX, Ghost Sign, image from Flickr

The marks of this early advertising culture are all around us today, sometimes revealed--as in this photo--by the restructurations of late capitalism. As the photographer notes, this ghost sign only became visible after a local business had been pulled down. Ghost signs, then, function as both advertisement and map, indexing a previously obscured spatial relationship to the past. Often overlooked or unobserved, ghost signs write out--visually signify--a complex map of urban histories.

Galveston, TX, Ghost Sign, image from Flickr

Multiple businesses can be encoded onto each other. Like a palimpsest, ghost signs narrate the derridean traces ("the mark of the absence of a presence, an always-already absent present") of history (local, cultural, capital) in physical form. They are inscrutable maps as well as unobtainable fantasies; as such, they represent almost pure representation (italicize), as it were, as they now exist without a goal or purpose, "signifying nothing."

Baltimore, MD, Ghost Sign, image from Flickr

From Sea to Shining McDonald's, and Other Americas: Critical Cartography II

Jake Ptacek — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 14:00:00 +0000

Image by Stephen von Worley

Last week, I wrote about the power of cold-war era maps when it comes to visualizing Western attitudes towards the Soviet bloc, and, in the work of William Bunge, visualizing themselves. This week I want to continue my trip down critical cartography's rabbit-hole with an overview of maps that attempt to locate forms of the "American experience." How can aspects of daily life in America be represented visually? The following maps try to answer that question, in playful, political, and subversive ways.

The image above, Stephen von Worley recounts on his website, is one attempt to answer the question, "How far away can you get from the world of generic convenience?" Transforming each McDonald's in the contiguous 48 states into one dot, von Worley redraws the US as an enormous network of lights. (The answer to the question, by the way, is 145 miles, by car, in southwestern South Dakota.) The map makes a compelling, if simple, statement about the prevalence of corporate experience throughout America.

Image: New York Times

Jumping from the corporate to the political, this 2008 map from the New York Times charts a single voter's relative political influence in the US. States have been resized based on a comparison of state population with the number of electoral votes allotted (it should be noted that the state population does not accurately reflect the number of acutal voters). The larger the state, the larger the influence. The size of Wyoming and the Dakotas should come as no surprise to anyone, but one thing the map handily reveals is the relative power of voters in Washington, D.C., Vermont, and Rhode Island. As the commentary that accompanies the map suggests, visuals like these help reveal the "one-person one-vote" myth that's prevalently held on both sides of the ideological divide; the truth, as always, is much more complicated.

Image: The Big Picture

The map above comes from Frank Jacobs's Strange Maps blog, an excellent web resource for all maps non-traditional (you'll note several maps from this post there). It breaks down the American Gross Domestic Product (GDP) into the GDPs of each individual state, and then renames each state with the name of a country with a similar GDP. The result is a fascinating international picture. This map is rough, of course, and doesn't take into account a per capita GDP, but, as Jacobs explains it, "this map does serve two interesting purposes: it shows the size of US states' economies relative to each other (California is the biggest, Wyoming the smallest), and it links those sizes with foreign economies (which are therefore also ranked: Mexico's and Russia's economies are about equal size, Ireland's is twice as big as New Zealand's)." What emerges is a truly unique view of the American economy (check his website for a more detailed account of the map).

Image by Matthew Zook

By contrast, the maps above and below, created by the folks over at FloatingSheep, reveal a very different American experience. According to their website, the cartographers at Floating Sheep are "dedicated to mapping and analyzing user generated Google Map placemarks." While this can sound drily academic, the maps they generate are often anything but. As they note, Google Maps documents users "memories, feelings, biases, and reactions to places," and though the site is powered by serious analytic and academic work, the maps capture the "collective intelligence"--or maybe better yet the collective unconscious--of internet users. Above, the group has mapped Google Map references to bars versus Google Map references to grocery stores. More references to bars generates a red dot. More grocery stores, a yellow. Who knew that Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota would be bar central? (Actually, as someone who grew up smack dab in one patch of red and went to college in another, I did...) In the map below, data from the PriceofWeed website (sorry, it's an academic post, no link; I imagine you can find it if you want) is mapped onto the US, creating an interesting picture of high-productivity growing and import areas.

Image: FloatingSheep

Image: Strange Maps

To conclude, two maps that zoom in geographically, taking a closer look at America. The first map, above, was produced by Paramount in the late 1930's (several different dates are floating around on the internet) by a seemingly unknown cartographer. It's a map of studio locations and where they've stood in for--a geography of fantasy, or good ol' Hollywood wish fulfillment. It's sort of boggling to see Spain next to San Diego, or Sherwood Forest just north of the Red Sea. I find it a charming representation of global geography, and perhaps more proof that--as my Northern Californian friends would say--SoCal residents think they're at the center of the world.

I've saved my favorite map for last, a particularly evocative image from Denis Wood's ongoing Narrative Atlas of Boylan Heights. Long a kind of mythic cartographic project, Wood has been making creative, non-traditional maps of the Boylan Heights neighborhood in Raleigh, NC for over four decades. Parts of that project were recently published as Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas, which is well worth looking into if maps interest you in the slightest. Wood, whose work has been featured on This American Life, makes maps of jack-o-lanterns, locations referenced in local papers, graffiti, and other non-standard ways of visualizing space. At their best, his maps challenge you to reconceptualize the world around you. The map below, simply entitled "Stars Map", is an attempt to situate Boylan Heights "in everything, that is, in the universe" according to Wood. I think there's something simple and evocative captured in the image, something I won't spoil with continued analysis. You can get a taste of some of Wood's other work here, and (as mentioned above) many of these maps have now been published.

Image by Denis Wood

The Octopus of Antwerp and Other Cold War Maps: Critical Cartographies I

Jake Ptacek — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Image: Life Magazine via Newberry Library

This is not the post I meant to write. My graduate research has increasingly involved reference to Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People in London, a magisterial attempt to combine statistical data and cartography into an analysis of late-nineteenth century urban London experience. I had intended to post on Booth's groundbreaking "poverty maps", and the updated maps created by the London School of Economics (you can see their side-by-side comparison here). In my research for the post, though, I came across John Krygier's Making Maps blog, and I've become fascinated (and sidetracked) by the surprising power of cartography. Inspired to think about how maps and mapmaking critically constructs the world, what follows is a subjective and fairly non-rigorous tour of Western cartography during the Cold War era.

Take that oil-pump / octopus above, from January 26, 1953. The polemical intent is fairly obvious--as the Newberry website points out, the ostensible purpose of the map is to display the flow of goods from "independently-minded Western Europeans" behind the Iron Curtain. But the over-the-top representation of Antwerp as somehow both an organism and machine adds powerful ideological content. And the sheer clutter of stuff depicted on the map--food, oil and ships falling from the tentacles, clusters of spies, communist soldiers, and factories in Berlin--creates an sense of overwhelming profusion. The map inverts our expectations, crowding the Communist Bloc with Western goods while leaving the rest of Europe almost blank. It's a sublime example of Krygier and Wood's argument about the purpose of mapping.

Image: C' est ne pas le monde, Krygier and Wood

In "This is Not the World," a comic book-cum-manifesto, Krygier and Wood argue that far from neutrally or even ideally indexing or "representing" the world, maps are arguments, propositions about the organization of the world. This is the central axiom of critical cartography--that each map represents an explicit set of choices that add up to argumentation. Like any other text, then, maps are open to reading, porous, and require critical distance.

Image: Time Magazine via Newberry Library

Undoing traditional expectations, R. M. Chapin's map, made for Time's October 2, 1950 issue, positions the viewer's eyeline from just behind Moscow. As the Newberry Library notes, the "progressively diminishing color intensities on the map suggest" blood "seeping downhill" from the USSR. It effectively repositions the viewer's gaze and, in its delirious shift in perspective--east faces up on the map--provokes anxiety. "Reading" the map forces us to recognize the distortions, even as we appreciate the skill, utilized by the cartographer.

Image: Saturday Evening Post

The above map, from the Saturday Evening Post, March 23, 1963, depicts presumed radioactive fallout from a hypothetical enemy attack. The (recent) map below, designed by Richard Miller, shows actual radioactive fallout in the US, dispersed by wind patterns, from nuclear tests in the American Southwest 1951-1962. In this case the Defense Department's propaganda tool disguised as "public safety" bulletin eerily mirrors the elegant argument produced by 21st century environmental and liberal narratives. Miller, however, replaces the shades of crayon-scribbles of red with provacatively neutral black, creating a beautiful inkblot of radiation across the US.

Image: Richard Miller via Making Maps

Finally, two images from my new favorite cartographer (how many times in life does one get to say that?), William Bunge. The more I learn about Bunge the more interesting his life seems--pioneering cartographer, radical Marxist (later Stalinist), environmentalist, beloved teacher, anti-academic, and all-around provocateur. The interested are highly recommended to read an excellent blog post by Zachary Forest Johnson that includes a fairly thorough mini-biography and lots of images, here. The following two images need little more comment than Bunge provides. They come from his pioneering Nuclear War Atlas (1988), a book committed to demonstrating how geography could become "the queen of the peace sciences." As Forest Johnson notes, the book suffered from poor timing, coming out just a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet-style communism in East Europe, but nonetheless its images are startlingly compact and elegant.

Image: William Bunge, Nuclear War Atlas, via Indiemaps

Though our society today faces radically different challenges than Bunge's late-Eighties western world, his conception of the liberating, peaceful power of geography remains essential. Especially as computers make cartography available to a much wider spectrum of users, understanding the critical power of maps becomes paramount. Next week I hope to examine how a few of Bunge's followers and admirers have taken up that task.

Google Maps Assignment by Sean McCarthy

Lisa Gulesserian — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 16:49:17 +0000

Image Credit: billolen

For a handout, download the PDF document outlining this assignment.

Objectives:

In this assignment, students are asked to create a GoogleMap to map a topic.

GoogleMaps allows students to create their own journeys and annotate place markers with text and multimedia content; they can upload their own photos to their map, link to YouTube clips, write text and link to blogs and other kinds of websites. This free service encourages them to build maps that tell stories in a visually interesting, geographically situated way, and all sorts of people, from news agencies to public transportation services, are now using maps to create new kinds of content (commonly called 'mashups'). GoogleMaps shows how fun and creative writing on the web can really be. With no experience and lots of imagination students can join the most creative people currently delivering content on the web.

In this assignment students will literally "map" a topic of their own choosing that relates to globalization. In other words, they are going to use the multimedia environment of GoogleMaps to tell their story and present their research to the rest of the class (and the rest of the world, if they wish!).

Materials/Equipment:

Internet access and a Google Account.

Preparation:

Students need to be taught how to navigate GoogleMaps. Fortunately, GoogleMaps are really easy to use. These introductory videos will show you the basics. Here’s the page that gives you step-by-step instructions on how to build your map. This YouTube video shows you how to create interactive place markers. Finally, Google Maps Mania is a great blog that shows how people are using GoogleMaps around the world. It provides links to hundreds of maps and is a great place to start thinking about your own map.

Procedure:

Midterm maps due: week 10/28

Final Map Due: 12/4

Accompanying Paper: due 12/4

Assignment Specifics:

The map will be evaluated as a Learning Record work sample. So, be sure to make observations about what you are learning as you are creating your map and use the work samples as a way of building your research. A draft of the map is due the week of 10/28, when we will spend the week on presentations of your maps. The ﬁnal map is due the last day of class as a work sample in your LR. In addition, you need to produce a two-page, single-spaced explanation of your choices for the map. In this short paper you will explain the idea behind the map—the intended audience, the choice of sources, why you chose that particular layout. etc.

My criteria for assessing your map are simple: how well do you use the map technology? How clear is the story you are trying to tell? How do you balance writing in the map with multimedia content? Will this map be useful and legible for your deﬁned audience? Will they understand what this map is about without having been in this class?

There are a number of ways you can ﬁll in your map. It must have at least 8 placemarkers that contain text, and some sort of reference to other multimedia resources (photos, hyperlinks, YouTube clips etc). The writing must by your own, though you obviously can use links to other text, audio and visual material to help tell your story. Part of the skill you will develop will be to decide what information to write into the placemarker and what you will leave to your hyperlinked sources. For example, how well can you tell the story within your map without forcing your audience to jump to other websites to ﬁll in the gaps? These are the kinds of important choices you must make. The success of your map will depend on the clarity of your writing, what sources you use and how you incorporate them, and the overall coherence of the project (in other words, can the reader easily understand the whole idea behind the map?).

You will need to do some research, but that research could include your own photographs (or photos you ﬁnd on the web); your own interview or podcast (or one you ﬁnd on the web), a really cool YouTube clip, or an informative website or blog. Remember, your GoogleMap and midterm paper can be on the same topic, so research for the map can count as an opportunity to develop your research for your midterm paper. The only real rules are that the map must in some way relate to the ideas we are talking about in class. It must be informative (in other words, it shows research) and there must be writing to assess. DON’T present me with just a bunch of photos or hyperlinks; it’s how you write about them that counts.

Presentations will be on the week of 10/28. The feedback you get from the class during these presentations you will be able to clarify your ideas and build a better map. After the presentations you will buddy with two other classmates. For the rest of the semester, you will be helping each other evaluate your maps using the map rating function built into GoogleMaps.

Critical Cartography: Aram Bartholl's "Map"

Lisa Gulesserian — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Image credit: Aram Bartholl's "Map"

Google Maps is a godsend—in our daily lives, we use the site to find a new place to live, track the settings of a public controversy, catch lawbreakers in the act, and claim land that’s been long-contested. Border scuffles and all, Google Maps is helping us reimagine the terrains, cities, and spaces of the real world. It was only a matter of time before we witnessed the melding of Google Maps virtual and Real World spatial. That time is now: Berlin-based artist Aram Bartholl has spent the last five years working on a project that brings Google Maps’ digital location markers into real city spaces. His installations in different cities in Europe and Asia—all entitled “Map”—ask us to question the lines between real and virtual, center and periphery.

Known for his work with “Dead Drops,” the USB sticks that were installed in bricks of urban buildings to encourage free and anonymous sharing, Bartholl has long been toying with the false dichotomy between digitized and lived experience. His art is a reminder that digital environments have their own spatial representations, and that these spaces have ramifications in our lived lives.

With “Map,” Bartholl makes us question real and digital, center and periphery, through an installation involving a massive 600x350x35 cm wood sculpture of the iconic red location markers in Google Maps. With the help of a tow truck and a crane, the location marker was placed in the center of the city (two example locations for the installation were Taipei and Berlin).

Image credit: Aram Bartholl's "Map"

From the pictures on Bartholl’s website, the markers are hard to distinguish from their digital counterparts. Both the digital markers and the “real” markers cast shadows. Both are perky punctuations in urban environments. Which of the markers is more real? Bartholl seems to nudge us in the direction of wondering whether this question matters anymore.

To further drive home how much effect Google Maps has on our ideas about places, Bartholl’s city center is the one that Google Maps provides when you search for the city. That center could be in an intersection, in a verdant wooded area, or in a dilapidated housing complex. Whatever the case, Bartholl’s installation asks us to question our ideas of center and periphery. What if your idea of the center of Berlin is different than the center of Berlin in Google Maps? What does the “center” of the city even mean in a digitized world?

Image credit: Aram Bartholl's "Map"

Bartholl’s work with the icons of Google Maps reminds us that maps are political productions. With maps, borders are drawn, districts are re-zoned, centers are marked. As geographers Jeremy W. Crampton and John Krygier argue in their “Introduction to Critical Cartography,” geographic knowledge is power, and hence, is political. With his cartographic installations, Aram Bartholl’s message is a political one; his work makes us rethink the boundaries that we have created when mapping digital and real, center and periphery, Google Maps or mental maps.

The 12 States of America

ladysquires — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 14:00:00 +0000

(Image Credit: The Atlantic)

I adore interactive maps, especially ones that come in sexy colors and with a wealth of demographic data. The Atlantic has a new one up by Dante Chinni and James Gimpel, authors of Our Patchwork Nation, that juxtaposes demographic data for individual counties and the rise or fall in average incomes. Chinni and Gimpel use these relationships to identify twelve "county types," each of which have some relationship to a demographic data point and a rise or fall in income. Seven of the county types have seen a decrease in effective income (adjusted for inflation) between 1980 and 2010.

The story this map tells is one of stagnating or falling household incomes throughout major sections of America an ossifying income inequalities. The map rather effectively argues that the United States is economically segregated, but by grouping these county types according to other demographic markers, the map is also clearly trying to tell another set of stories as well, and it is these that I am somewhat less certain about. Why these data points? Given the lack of analysis, what relationship are we supposed to be seeing between race, religion, occupations, age, and incomes? And without any other forms of mediation, do these, in a way, reinforce certain stereotypes? For example, the designation of certain counties as "Minority Central" seems to sort of obliterate race/income disparaties within counties and cities. (There is also something off-putting about the language that I can't quite identify).

The selection of Evangelicalism and Mormonism as the only two religious identifiers further also embodies the tendency to suggest that Evangelical Protestantism and its derivatives are the only religions that really count when we talk about religion, even, as I demonstrated in my post on the ARDA maps, the most religious counties in the U.S. are actually those that are dominated by Catholics.

In conclusion, while I find this interactive map helpful in some ways and basically rhetorically effective at its primary objective--illustrating income inequality--I find that its use of these other demographic data points oversimplifies and suggests relationships that need more intervention in order for the viewer to be able to determine if that relationship is causal or merely correlational.

War Games - Isao Hashimoto

Michael Widner — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 13:30:00 +0000

"1945-1998" by Isao Hashimoto

Originally created in 2003 by the Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto, "1945-1998" maps all 2053 nuclear explosions during that period.

A Wired article from the time quotes Hashimoto as saying he wanted to show "the fear and folly of nuclear weapons." The increasing pace of tests culminates in a global frenzy of explosions. Each nation's tests have a different color and sound associated with them. The effect is oddly beautiful and reminiscent of an early video game. Even the counters for each nation look like scores.

Hashimoto states that he chose lights and sounds to provide "equal messaging to all viewers without language barrier," yet the clear association with video games also invokes a chilling disconnect between form and content. While appreciating the abstract beauty of the map, we also consider the horror of mass destruction displayed in such a seemingly trivial form. It reminds me of another cautionary work in the war-as-video-game genre:

Picturing "Severe Weather "

ebfrye — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 06:11:36 +0000

Image Credit: "Hermine Heads Inland," the Weather Channel

Not only is it the beginning of the semester for us, but it’s hurricane season and we, in central Texas, are feeling the effects of Tropical Depression Hermine. Today, I’d like to share a few visual representations of severe weather and begin an investigation of their effects on the viewing public.

Picturing “severe weather” also frequently implies a consideration of what its aftermath or indeed its “disaster” might look like, given that we often don’t devote a heightened attention to the weather until there is cause for concern. Most commonly, our visual conceptions of severe weather and their corresponding threats of disaster begin with a map. (See Laura T. Smith’s post on other mappings of "disasters" here.)

The above image from the Weather Channel, like others we frequently encounter in other local and national news media, was produced through Doppler radar. Viewers who otherwise are unfamiliar with the workings of Doppler radar can recognize the significance of the color-coded screen imagery that indicates both a storm’s path and precipitation levels.

Perhaps most importantly, these color codes for precipitation often correspond with the possible severity of a particular storm. For a viewing public that often switches between both cable and network channels for weather and national goings-on, such a system communicates its meaning quite easily. The color-coded representations of storm clusters tap into a shared sense of danger, and meteorologists, those persons of science who resemble newscasters, are tasked with emphasizing such warnings. Having grown up in the tornado-ridden South, these Doppler radar maps were the last media-produced images I saw before my mother hurried us to the basement, battery-powered radio in hand.

Yet, what intrigues me is that, in our post-9/11 culture, I can’t help but be reminded of the Homeland Security advisory system whenever I look at one of these weather maps. Perhaps that is the intention? Indeed, the potential strength of weather-related phenomena is visually rendered as a “threat level,” and I have trouble divorcing it from my Bush-era conditioned response to airports and travel advisories. Each time I look at a map of my local area under threat of "severe weather," I am also, rather unconsciously, applying a color-coded, and therefore visual, metaphorics of “terror.”

Consequently, if an awareness of “severe weather” also appears as a highly-charged awareness of “terror,” what other cache of images does that imply?

Coming Close to Environmental Disaster

Laura T. Smith — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 05:47:27 +0000

(Image Credit: Google Earth image of ash cloud in Iceland , produced with GeoEye satellite imagery)

My very dear friend Tes is stuck in Ireland this week, grounded by the great Iceland ash cloud and hoping to get back in time for her dissertation defense. She’s been looking for a t-shirt that says, “Eyjafjallajokull 2010” for days, but evidently, no one’s selling.

Her steady stream of emails from Ireland made me think to go look for Google Earth volcanic imagery, and indeed, there are new satellite images from “GeoEye Featured Imagery” (Under “Layers,” click on “More,” then “GeoEye.”) The above picture allows us to see smoke coming out of a bright spot near the mid-left of the image and great clouds of ash floating down toward the bottom-right corner.

This search made me wonder if imagery had been updated—or high-res imagery had ever been produced—of Upper Big Branch Mine, the site of the massive West Virginia mining disaster that took 29 lives last week.

What I found was interesting. Upper Big Branch Mine in Montcoal, WV can be seen, in its current state, in this photo.

(Image Credit: Google Earth image Upper Big Branch Mine in Montcoal, WV)

It’s a mountaintop mine, so what you see is a mountain with its top cut away. If you have your “Global Awareness” layer turned on (as I do in the above picture), you’ll see a yellow box drawn around the mining site. These boxes appear around mountaintop mining sites throughout West Virginia and are maintained by Appalachian Mountaintop Removal, a group that has built an electronic “Memorial For the Mountains.”

You’ll see a blue square at the upper-left corner of the yellow box. If you’re in Google Earth and you click on that square, you find historical imagery of the mining area. The below image shows the same mountain in 1986.

(Image Credit: Google Earth historical image Upper Big Branch Mine in Montcoal, WV)

The difference is startling, and the Appalachian Mountaintop Removal project's electronic memorial makes this information readily and publically available. Each "Memorial" placemark links to the previous and next mountain on the tour, so you can click through them and learn about the history of West Virginia’s natural areas and the mining industry's activity. The organization says that they will continue to archive imagery, with the goal of providing three decades of continuous historical imagery to document the area’s rapid change.

These images of Iceland and Montcoal allow us to visit the areas affected by disaster and see how disasters are being documented, whether by major corporations like GeoEye, or by local interest groups like Appalachian Mountaintop Removal.

Google Earth Pedagogies: Making the Most of Map Databases

Laura T. Smith — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:10:47 +0000

(Image source: Library of Congress Map Collections)

The above map, created by George Washington in 1766, depicts “A plan of my farm on Little Huntg. Creek & Potomk.” This map, which is publicly viewable at the Library of Congress Map Collections and downloadable as a high-resolution JPEG2000 file, is included in the Collections’ “Cultural Landscapes” section, which highlights the ongoing cultural construction of United States and World landscapes through the ways individuals, communities, and nations modify land. This subsection of the online Collection places an array of cartographic materials into conversation: a set of local maps authored by George Washington, a series of maps of Liberia created by the American Colonization Society, and a store of historical U.S. atlases.

One of the distinguishing features of The Library of Congress’s Map Collection is that it is part database, part exhibit. The online Collection boasts sophisticated cataloguing and imaging standards, allowing users to zoom in on maps, examine details, download high-resolution image files, and refer to helpful notes about the map’s physical features and provenance, including scale, media, size, accompanying materials, and source. The site also offers helpful advice about copyright, noting that materials in the collection are generally not copyrighted materials; the maps “were either published prior to 1922, produced by the United States government, or both.” The site clearly aims to make the Library’s cartographic collections freely available and digitally accessible and to encourage users to download and use these materials for study, education, research, and enjoyment. The site intersects at many points with the Library’s larger “American Memory” project, which has digitized over five million items from the Library’s Collections since 1996.

I am interested in the possibilities of a maps database such as the Library of Congress Map Collections partly because of the prospect of using historical maps within Google Earth, and partly because our Visual Rhetoric workgroup is preparing to host an upcoming workshop, “Best Practices for Digital Images” on Friday March 26^th at 1 pm. One component of the workshop will be an introduction to the many rich image databases that are available on the web. To that end, some of our posts over the next few weeks will serve to review and evaluate some of these databases.

Three significant, online map databases are The Library of Congress Map Collections, the Perry-Castanada Map Collection at the University of Texas Libraries, and the David Rumsey Map Collection.

These collections all have large holdings that are available to the public and offer downloadable images, though only the Library of Congress and the David Rumsey Collection offer consistently high-resolution downloads. (The Perry-Castanada Map Collection seems to prioritize keeping files to a manageable size for its users; the website claims that most of its images, usually JPEGS or PDFs, are kept to size standards of 200K to 300K.) These three collections, run by a federal organization, a public university, and a private company, respectively, vary widely in terms of cataloguing and indexing practices, image quality, image context, and general online experience.

My aim today will be to offer a very brief overview of the first two image collections, Library of Congress Map Collections and the Perry-Castanada Map Collection. (I'll discuss the Rumsey Collection in a later post.) I will give an expanded analysis of the features and utility of Library of Congress’s Collection for pedagogical applications.

The Library of Congress Map Collections, the online arm of the Library of Congress’s Geography and Map Division, represents a small fraction of the holdings of the Map Division’s collection, which includes more than 4.5 million items. The Library of Congress Map Collections began as a massive digitizing project in 1995. The Library does not estimate how many maps are online, but notes that new materials are digitized and added continually.

The Perry-Castanada Map Collection includes more than 250,000 maps, 11,000 of which are available for online viewing. (In addition, maps from the Perry-Castanada Map Collection can also be physically checked out by students, faculty, or the general public for a two-week borrowing period.) As I noted above, the Perry-Castanada Collection does not prioritize providing high-resolution images or downloads of their materials; their files, generally formatted as JPEGs, GIFs, or PDFs, are considerably smaller than those of the other two sites. The Perry-Castanada Collection does offer categorized links to hundreds of other map collections though, including the Library of Congress and The Rumsey Collection, as well as other research collections and independent web sites.

While each digitized map is indexed in the Library’s general catalogue, the Maps Collection does not include the catalogue information or a link to the catalogue entries, so, in fact, the amount of information about the map available with the image is minimal, usually including the title of the map or atlas in which it was printed, its publication date, and sometimes the organization that published or produced it. The user has to separately look up the map in the online catalogue to obtain full information. The full catalogue entries offer additional information such as the map’s author, but the general purpose catalogue does not give the depth of information one might expect from a special collections catalogue entry, including detailed notes about medium, size, inscriptions, accompany materials, or provenance.

As I noted earlier, the Library of Congress Map Collection works like a database and an online exhibit at once. The materials are indexed via a number of different methods: the whole collections is divided into seven major thematic categories, which allow users topical entry into the cartographic resources. Those categories include

“Cities and Towns” (which includes a number of panoramic maps, a cartographic style popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries)
“Conservation and Environment” (including the subcollection, “Mapping the National Parks”)
“Discovery and Exploration”
“Cultural Landscapes”
“Military Battles and Campaigns” (including American Revolution and Civil War maps)
“Transportation and Communication” (including a collection of Railroad Maps)
“General Maps”

Nearly every collection includes a “Special Presentation,” an online exhibition with text and images that invites users to delve into some selected resources within the collection, rather than using the site by entering specific search terms. This feature allows users to have a curated, museum experience, clearly serving not only the Library’s goal of making documents available to the public, but also its educational goals.

While users can browse within these thematic categories, which include their own Collection Guides, users can also search by keyword, or browse indexes by geographic location, subject, map creator, or map title.

Indeed, as the above list of browse-able indexes suggests, the site relies heavily on browsing to make its resources available to users. For example, as the visitor enters the Railroad Maps Collection, she finds only a very cursory introduction to the collection—a total of five lines of text—on its home page, and this Collection happens to include no curated “Special Presentation” to introduce the user to the Collection’s material, so searching or browsing become her best methods of accessing information. Fortunately, the Geographic Location Index offers a robust, visual, clickable map icons to help users locate materials by country (Canada, United States, Mexico, and West Indies), U.S. region, and U.S. state.

In this way, the Library of Congress Map Collections site combines sophisticated cataloguing methods with an inviting, browse-able online environment. The icons that accompany the seven thematic categories perhaps best express this mission of the site: each is a collage of multiple materials from the category, with numbers identifying the source of each element of the collage, which are clickable:

(Image source: Library of Congress Map Collections)

The Cultural Landscapes icon, for example, pairs a detail from the 1766 Washington map (pictured in full at top) with a detail from an 1867 American Colonization Society map, “St. Pauls River, Liberia at its mouth.” The clickable collage, which links to each element's catalogue page, represents the site’s values: user-based discovery (facilitated by either browsing or searching), curated experience, thematic intersections, accessibility, and high-quality image and cataloguing standards. By clicking on the category icon, the user not only enters the "Cultural Landscapes" section, but is confronted by provocatively juxtaposed visuals accompanied by links to each detailed source page.

Not surprisingly, the site offers extensive materials for teachers, including classroom ideas, lesson plans, and primary source sets (groups of images related to a historical period or theme) through its “Collection Connections” section.

The Collection’s choice of somewhat unusual file formats for images is, perhaps, an unfortunate extension of the value placed, at once, on accessibility and high quality that I appreciate throughout most of the site. Rather than offering more common image file formats such as TIFFs GIFS, or JPEGS, the Library has chosen to compress their large documents as JPEG2000 and MrSID files to preserve detail and enable high-resolution downloads. Both of these formats require plug-ins, and while the site offers links to free versions, I would have liked to have available a low-resolution option (a GIF or JPEG) that required no software plug-in.

Food Insecurity and the Food Environment Atlas

fc — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:27:28 +0000

Image Credit: screen shot of http://www.ers.usda.gov/FoodAtlas/

Last week, First Lady Michelle Obama introduced Let's Move, a new government initiative aimed at ending the childhood obesity epidemic within one generation. After attending the signing of a Presidential memorandum forming a special task force on childhood obesity, Mrs. Obama officially launched the Let's Move campaign at a press conference with reporters, cabinet-level secretaries and local school children. During the press conference, the First Lady introduced the Food Environment Atlas, a new website for locating "food deserts" and otherwise visualizing the availability of healthy food to households around the country. More about the Food Atlas after the jump.

I spent some time looking through the variety of maps available on the Food Atlas, and noticed a number of alarming-even-if-expected geographical correlations. I found the "Persistent Child Poverty Rate" map one of the most interesting baselines to use for mapping food insecurity in the country. (As a side note, my home state of Texas has the highest rate of childhood food insecurity in the country: more than one in five Texas children lack access to enough food to meet their basic needs at all times.)

Image Credit: screen shot from http://www.ers.usda.gov/FoodAtlas/

The rate of persistent childhood poverty in this country translates geographically into limited access to grocery stores. The map below shows the percent of households with no car who live more than one mile from the nearest grocery store.

Image Credit: screen shot from http://www.ers.usda.gov/FoodAtlas/

Lack of access to healthy foods including fresh fruits and vegetables translates in turn into a variety of chronic health problems. The two maps below show the rates of adult obesity (top) and adult diabetes (bottom).

Image Credits: screen shots from http://www.ers.usda.gov/FoodAtlas/

Taken together, these images present a rather damning indictment against the richest country in the history of the world. The truth is that many Americans go hungry every day, and even those whose stomachs are filled frequently suffer from malnutrition, defined by WHY as "A failure to achieve proper nutrient requirements, which can impair physical and/or mental health. It may result from consuming too little food or a shortage or imbalance of key nutrients (e.g., micronutrient deficiencies or excess consumption of refined sugar and fat)." Federal farm subsidies on crops like corn and soybeans make energy-dense, corn- and soy-heavy processed foods cheaper per calorie than fruits, vegetables and whole grains. As a result, low-income and food-insecure households often find the cost increase of eating healthy meals challenging if not prohibitive. The First Lady's campaign against childhood obesity as well as the federal government's attempts to reform our healthcare system and bring disease-related expenditures and long-term health costs under control cannot afford to ignore these links between income, food availability and chronic illness.

An article from last month's New York Times tells us that one in five Americans had trouble buying food last year. A separate article from last week's Times carried some mixed good news: individual states are doing a better job of enrolling eligible citizens in SNAP, the federal "food stamp" program. According to the same article, the social stigma attached to food stamps is also easing up do in part to the sheer number of enrollees. SNAP currently feeds one in eight Americans and almost one quarter of the nation's children. The recession has also made accepting federal assistance less objectionable; this map, also from the Times, shows the increase in SNAP enrollment since 2007. The darkest shade represents an increase of over sixty percent.

Image Credit: screen shot from The New York Times

There are other signs of progress around the country. Along with her Let's Move program and the White House kitchen garden, Michelle Obama has been vocal in support of farmers markets and other ways of bringing fresh, healthy fruits and vegetables into underserved neighborhoods. She was active in advocating and supporting a new farmers market that recently opened just blocks from the White House. On opening day, she told reporters, “I’ve learned that when my family eats fresh food, healthy food, that it really affects how we feel, how we get through the day, and that’s whether we’re trying to get through math homework or whether there’s a Cabinet meeting or whether we’re just walking the dog.’’

Image Credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Another hopeful sign comes from efforts to make SNAP easier to use at farmers markets like the one above and from local government efforts to move supermarkets and their produce sections into underserved neighborhoods. There are also a number of community and non-profit organizations working to combat hunger and malnutrition in American cities. There is hope that efforts like the First Lady's combined with legistlative action and community involvement, we won't become a country with two distinct food systems respectively feeding and starving the rich and poor.

Google Earth Pedagogies: From Haiti to RHE 306

Laura T. Smith — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:41:30 +0000

Image Credit: Google Lat Long Blog

If were you watching the news in mid-January, you likely saw images like those above flashing repeatedly across your television or computer screen. Unlike the photojournalistic, street-level portraits that tend to document disasters, these aerial shots, produced through a collaboration between Google Earth and GeoEye (a satellite imaging company), have been prominent in the visual coverage of the earthquake that hit Haiti on January 12, 2010. The above images show pre- and post-quake views of the Presidential Palace (top left; top right) and downtown Port au Prince (bottom left; bottom right), and were created using the timeline tool in Google Earth.

I’ve been interested in the prominent role that mapping and satellite-produced imagery has played in the coverage and documentation of the Haiti earthquake, partly for its own sake, and partly because I’m planning a Google Earth-based collaborative writing activity for my Rhetoric and Writing class this spring.

In the earthquake coverage, the intimate, affect-laden portrait—framed by the human eye, scaled to the human story—has remained prominent, of course, but has been augmented by this second visual approach, which has, itself, received significant news coverage. These visuals do not function the same way photojournalistic visuals function; they do not focus on the human situation; they do not construct an explicitly emotional appeal.

These sophisticated, accurate maps of damage have clearly aided rescue and relief efforts. Yet I’ve been wondering about the analytical impulses behind mapping and its effects—especially given the debates during the past few weeks about Haiti’s leadership, its autonomy, about who’s in control of relief efforts.

The history of mapping is entangled with the history of imperial expansion, shot through with impulses toward geographical control. In what ways do these contemporary mapping technologies address or confront the imperial history of map-making? While much of the mapping of Haiti has been accomplished through satellite imaging, Haiti has also been mapped collaboratively, by countless individuals with diverse motivations. (Google’s Haiti Map Maker project encourages such collaborative, local mapping.) Similarly, Wikipedia’s “Haiti” page is currently ranked in 1885th place among the most-edited pages in the last 30 days, a number that, while seemingly high, in fact indicates an extraordinarily high volume of recent edits. So, what effect does crowd-sourcing have on the implications of mapping? Is crowd-sourced mapping anti-imperialist mapping?

As I noted earlier, I’ve been considering all these questions about mapping and its implications because I’m in the process of planning a Google Earth-based collaborative writing activity with Geo-Everything’s Caroline Wigginton. We’ll be using Google Earth technologies to explore issues raised by Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food. The activity, which will involve both of our RHE 306 classes, will take place in early April. In preparation for this collaboration, I’ll be using this blog throughout the spring semester to discuss Google Earth, its applications for the literature, rhetoric, and composition classroom, and, in particular, the potential it creates for collaborative writing.

As I’ve begun to think through the possibilities, I’ve come up with a few initial questions, which I’ll address (and likely add to) in the coming weeks:

For the purpose of the writing classroom, what are differences between Google Earth and Google Maps?
What are their different critical capacities? How do they ask students to conceptualize information differently?
What are their different collaborative capabilities? Is Google Earth inherently more collaborative? How can this capacity be used in the writing classroom?
How might some of the conceptual and technological features of Google Earth (the “fly to” function, the moveable timeline, the placing of local sites in the context of a globe) enable writing and thinking exercises that are different than those possible in Google Maps?

Mapping the Eighteenth Century: A Report from CSECS

Rachel Schneider — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:03:19 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from The Grub Street Project

While I wrote in my last blog here that I would use this week’s blog to discuss my upcoming conference paper for MMLA, I was led astray this weekend by an excellent panel I attended at CSECS that I thought the viz. audience might enjoy. (Sorry, Gossip Girl fans. Tune in next week!)

After deciding to attend the panel entitled “Mapping Culture: Topographies of London,” I was delighted to discover it featured not only a paper on Boswell’s enchanting London Journal, but also an excellent discussion about using mapping strategies to teach and research eighteenth-century texts. What united the various papers on the panel, which discussed such disparate texts as John Gay’s “Trivia,” the Mohock Club, Boswell’s aforementioned Journal, and Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, was that each paper was based on material provided by The Grub Street Project, a website that unites topographical data with literary texts like Pope’s Dunciad.

As explained by Allison Muri, both the panel’s chair and the website's designer, The Grub Street Project’s goal “is to visualize the literary and cultural history of London.” The About the Project page also notes that

High-resolution “zoomable” maps from 18th-century prints associated with a database of bibliographical and topographical data, trades indexes, and literary texts afford new possibilities for not only seeing the relationships between trades, book production, and dissemination of ideas, but also for seeing the topographies of literary imagination.

As the incredibly topical (and topographical) texts of the early eighteenth-century require some previous processing for undergraduate students to understand the references, I was delighted to see how well The Grub Street Project works to help visualize these texts in intriguing ways. (I most enjoyed Kurt Kruger’s paper on “Gentleman and Topography in Boswell’s London Journal: 1762-1763,” and thought that his map of Boswell’s first month in London well represented how Boswell topographically conceives of gentlemanliness.)

Image Credit: Screenshot from The Grub Street Project

I also enjoyed how this panel raised interesting questions about the pedagogical purposes of visual material not only in explaining the eighteenth-century, but also in making arguments about the eighteenth-century to students and scholars alike. While I know that our own distinguished Sean McCarthy has led the way in showing how Google Maps can work in the writing classroom, visual data can often be difficult for certain kinds of students to interpret, and its conclusions can sometimes seem “obvious,” for better or worse. As I’ve been thinking this week about Chaim Perelman’s New Rhetoric for a class I’m taking with Trish Roberts-Miller, I wonder if there’s something about visual arguments that may appeal to the universal audience, but that are similarly difficult to understand as constructed, just as rhetors can forget that the universal audience itself is a rhetorical product. Our language encodes the value of visuals in such maxims as “a picture is worth a thousand words,” but how are we supposed to interpret that picture? And what safeguards are there to prevent misinterpretation? As we move into explicitly teaching digital literacies to students, however, these questions will help students to consider more carefully how they evaluate and analyze visuals as rhetorical objects.

At any rate, The Grub Street Project has great functionality and is very intuitive to use. In addition to things like UT’s eComma, I am beginning to visualize a literature classroom that integrates web materials fully.

The United states of Nations: a juxtapositional reading

Nate Kreuter — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:15:48 +0000

Image credit: James Richards, via Strange Maps

The dark corners of the intertubes are populated by weirdly animated detritus. In one particular corner I found Strange Maps, an intellectual terra incognita. Here is one map from the site, in which map-author and vexillologist James Richards has filled in United States states with the flags of other nations with populations equal to that of the correlate United States state. What is the point of such a map? It takes us nowhere. It is trivia, contrived comparison, meaningless. Indeed.

This *is* an odd land, and there is perhaps no better way to understand, as a stranger in a strange land, the strangeness than that quintessentially American experience and myth, the road trip. "Buy the ticket, take the ride," someone screams in Jack's ear as he discreetly tries to fill in his fantasy baseball roster.

In the Lonestar People's Republic of North Texorea . . . imagine it . . .

The high plains meth labs have been bulldozed. Justice remains swift. And decisive. The governor's call to secession has been fulfilled. President Rick Perry, in his paramilitary uniform of high commander, sings along to the Lonestar Republic's national anthem and reviews the People's Army, parading forth from Camp Mabry and into the Austin city streets. "Keep Austin Weird," the buzz-cut forces shout in unison as they pass the review stand. The death penalty endures, but the process has been expedited. The workaday Texicans have traded in their Pearl for Pulrosul (an alcoholic concoction bottled with a dead adder inside), and good ol' boys, no longer satisfied with whiskey and rye, swill the juice of the alcohol addled adders, and later bite their heads off. The mezcal worm has turned, into a snake. Our trip begins just out of reach of the center of State power in Austin, on Interstate 35. We drive north. "Keep the Weird in Austin."

The border crossing between North Korean Texas and Oklahoman Moldova is awkward, because our papers are not in order. Not wanting to allow the authorities of either nation state time to catch on, we speed further north. The Choctaw remain dispossessed, but the casinos still operate at full tilt.

Kansas, no longer safe harbor for Fred Phelps and his lolly-pop guild army of Westboro Baptist Church, is New Jamaica. One of the whitest states in the Union now caters to the cliches of Island tourist expectations. Bleached, Wonderbread whitened reggae is the new elevator music, and the tourists converge. But all is not well as Jimmy Cliff spins in his grave on the grain-fatted plain. "There's no place like home" and this ain't no island in the Caribbean, Dorothy. Home is not here. We can't flycast for bonefish in the New Jamaica. Definitely not home.

We spin across Nicaraguan Missouri. The Royals and Cardinals play futbol now. Jack is disappointed. We take in a few games, but the rioting is intolerable. A Pole is calling it the second soccer war. Back into the car. George Brett is not pleased, but he stays behind in Kansas City, and remains irregular. Or too regular.

Still bearing up I-35, we travel over the rich loam of Albanian Iowa. The border crossing is smooth here. There are no communists in sight at this crossing. The guards shake hands with each other and trade exotic brands of cigarettes. We turn a hard right on I-80 in Des Moines, which, because the Albanians are just happy to be here and the Iowans are such hospitable hosts, has been allowed to keep its neutrally French name.

East on I-80, and Illinois has become Zambian Illinois, not Kenyan Illinois, and right-wing conspiracy theorists continue to question the natal origins of President Obama.

In Paraguayan Indiana, Andes have sprung from the farms.

"Greek" Ohio is a wasteland. These are the wrong Greeks, frat boys. We don't stop, not for gas or even a quick piss.

We detour briefly into Guinea Michigan, and Detroit---the ~~metaphorical~~ literal coal fired asshole of American industry---has been replaced by the similarly coastal city of Conakry, population 1,857,153, and falling. There was never any auto industry here, just an unnecessarily malarial West African metropolis, population falling.

In Penn-Zimbabwe we turn south, off of I-80 finally and onto I-99, which brings us to State College and Penn State University, where "We are?!" is now met with resounding answers of "Zimbabwe!" when the call-and-response is initiated at random.

Back in North Korean Texas, immigration issues no longer rate, and across the Rio Grande Valley the Mexican nationalists are discussing the idea of a Great Wall to keep the riff-raff out.

Images like the map Richards has created have little immediate meaning, besides perhaps for the referential relationships they invite us to recognize or invent. Perhaps we do need the captions?

But this is all just silly, right? A silly series of comparisons, and rambling at that, invited by a silly image. Such comparison could not tell us much, or at least not much that is meaningful, about our more real world. Perhaps:

Kim Jong Il

Texas Governor Rick Perry

Texas Flag

North Korean Flag

Tunnel Under US/Mexico Border

Tunnel Under South Korea/North Korea Border

Wikipediavision: Visualizing anonymous edits to Wikipedia

John Jones — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 15:31:46 +0000

László Kozma, a grad-student at the Helsinki University of Technology, has created Wikipediavision a mashup of Wikipedia edits and Google maps reminiscent of Twittervision and Flickrvision.

Here’s part of the description from the site’s FAQ:

WikiPediaVision is a visualization of edits to the English Wikipedia, almost the same time as they happen. . . . For each wikipedia edit I display the title of the article, the summary of the edit (if the person who made it gave any summary), link to the changes that were made to the article, geographical location of the wikipedia user and the time the edit happened.

Apparently, Kozma’s site skips a lot of edits:

First of all, edits on wikipedia happen at a faster rate, than what could be comfortably readable, so I have to skip some of them. Second, a good part of the edits are done by registered users. Their IP address is protected by wikipedia, therefore I could only display anonymous edits. Thirdly, those edits, where the IP address could not be located are skipped. Fourth, edits that are similar or identical to recent edits are often skipped. This still leaves more than enough to be visualized.

However, the project is still interesting. Hopefully he will expand it in the future.

via Brady Forrest at O’Reilly Radar

Wolrd Freedom Atlas

John Jones — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 16:51:47 +0000

The World Freedom Atlas gathers a number of interesting datasets related to world politics and human rights and converts them into a dynamic map display. Interestingly, the visual display helps to foreground the rhetorical choices made by the authors of those datasets. For instance, the map below displays a country’s governmental structure, ranging from a parliamentary democracy (white) to monarchic dictatorship (dark blue) (Cheibub and Gandhi, 2004). Notice that the U.S., a presidential democracy, falls in the middle of the classification scheme, closer to the dictatorships than Canada and Australia, which are both white, as well as Russia, which is a light teal.

via Information Aesthetics

The pixelator

John Jones — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 02:22:46 +0000

Following up on Nate’s post about retouched photos, The Daily Show has revealed some contemporary presidential image-retouching:

Apparently the Vice President has had his residence pixelated on Google Earth. Interestingly, the White House and Congress are left in high-resolution.

Update: The YouTube video I had orignially linked is gone, so I replaced it with a video from Comedy Central’s site. I was informed, however, that the video will “expire on July 28, 2007.”

Visualizing GDP

Nate Kreuter — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 16:47:33 +0000

I found an interesting post on Reason magazine's Hit & Run blog in which the Gross Domestic Products (GDPs) of various nations are correlated with the GDPs of US states. The map is a fascinating comment on global economics, and more info on its background is available through the original Hit & Run post.

The Hit & Run blog, incidentally, is a product of the libertarian publication Reason, which, regardless of what you think of its politics, is a good place to troll for stories pertaining to visual culture. I also like to use to site to dig for news stories to use in rhetoric classes, because they are frequently argumentative and also because they tangle the typical left vs. right allegiances many of my students follow blindly, which I find allows me to open up controversies like immigration in productive ways. Again, this isn't an endorsement of the blog's specific politics, but definitely is an endorsement of its detail-oriented, non-mainstream news coverage.

Baghdad bombings map

John Jones — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 18:43:51 +0000

The BBC has created an interactive graphic that displays Baghdad’s shifting ethnic population as well as the date and location of bombings in the city. Using the slider at the bottom of the graphic, the user can see small points appear and fade away at the bombing locations. Moving through time, the bombings become more frequent. Not only is this a well-made graphic, it is a disarmingly simple demonstration of the rising violence in Iraq’s capital city.