Below’s a quick outline of the first maps created with six common cartographic symbologies. All of the below is out there, in books, articles, and blog posts. Particularly helpful are Alan MacEachren’s 1979 article The Evolution of Thematic Cartography, Arthur Robinson’s Early Thematic Mapping in the History of Cartography (1982), Borden Dent’s thematic cartography [...]
posts tagged 'symbology'
Oct 16 2009
classed cartograms
Classification is commonplace in thematic cartography. In choropleth mapping, classification is the norm. This was not always so. The first choropleth map (created by Baron Charles Dupin in 1826) was unclassed.
According to Arthur Robinson, in his Early Thematic Mapping in the History of Cartography:
So far as we now know, the [...]
Dec 08 2008
Early cartograms
I’m kind of on a cartogram kick lately. I’m interested in the pioneers of the form, those who first thought to distort borders and explode topologies in order to convey the distribution of some thematic variable. When was the first cartogram produced, where, and by whom? I ran into a lot of [...]