A Handsome Atlas: 19th Century Data Visualizations

September 12, 2012 12:36 PM

A Handsome Atlas: 19th Century Data Visualizations
Just in time for the 1876 centennial, the US Census Bureau published the very first Statistical Atlas: detailed maps, ornate graphs, and generally insane charts all about America. These atlases persisted for a couple decades before the Census Bureau decided they didn't like fun any more. Now they're online in the most awesome of ways.

The Library of Congress had some scans up, but they weren't all too accessible. I dressed them up in a hopefully-pleasant interface and now they're yours to know and love.

FEATURING!

A crazy graph of the history of political parties.

Distribution of sexes! Go East, young man, there are too many of you in the West already.

Quasi-treemaps of who has the most churches.

What's the story with the national debt? Three words: THE CIVIL WAR

This visualization will make you feel like you are hallucinating.

I'm starting to tag them, too, so if you like pie charts or maps or whatnot you're all good to go.

Role: everything

posted by soma lkzx (8 comments total)

This project was posted to MetaFilter by carsonb on September 12, 2012: A Handsome Atlas: 19th Century Data Visualizations

Really, really well done. Thank you!
posted by carsonb at 2:47 PM on September 12, 2012

Oh but something on the homepage crashes my Chrome (21.0.1180.89 m). Xo\
posted by carsonb at 2:48 PM on September 12, 2012

Hhhhrrrmmm, not sure - it seems to be working on my Chrome (OS X), and it's showing up in Adobe Browserlab all right for the Windows one. I don't doubt it's a troublemaker, though, I've been deploying fixes like a madman all day.
posted by soma lkzx at 3:41 PM on September 12, 2012

Nice work, although there goes any kind of productivity this evening.

Works fine in Chrome OS X here as well.
posted by nenequesadilla at 4:36 PM on September 12, 2012

Yeah, I'm rockin' some badass public computers at work, running Windows XP, so there's a good chance I'm a total outlier.
posted by carsonb at 4:42 PM on September 12, 2012

One "large map blogger" to another: You've made an awesome thing and it looks gorgeous. The presentation is pretty much peerless among collections of this type; and I've seen most all of them.

High praise to you, as well, for making the LoC accession number info front-and-center available. This is so useful and appreciated and this one act puts you, ethically, in the top two percent of online map providers (the majority of which are obscurantist bastards who guard such things jealously).

Well done, and I'm excited to see where you take this; it's a very auspicious beginning. You should be proud.
posted by jjjjjjjijjjjjjj at 8:25 PM on September 12, 2012 [2 favorites]

This is wonderful!
posted by mareli at 12:15 PM on September 14, 2012

Well done!
posted by a humble nudibranch at 10:56 PM on September 15, 2012