Rikenography

This might be a tangential Riken’s Links but that doesn’t really matter. I’ve found a few interesting things I’ve wanted to show people so I guess this is the best place to do it.

First up was a really great video of the Trans Siberian Railway that has been matched with Google maps to its location as it travels across the length of the Russian nation. What is pretty great about the Google hosted page linked here, is that you can listen while traveling to the sound of the train, or if you want to put yourself in the position of the traveler, the books on tape of Tolstoy and Gogol. You can start in Moscow and either jump ahead to interesting sections, or travel the length of Siberia until you finally make it in Vladivostok. Also, the videos hosted on Youtube go to an amazingly clear 1080p HD. (Thanks to my brother James)

Next up I have a selection of info-graphics created by some very clever people. Susanna Hertrich has done some great work, but my favorite is one depicting the perception of risk and actual hazards:

Last up is another awesome visualization of the undersea cables that line the ocean’s floor sending the first international telegraphs and hosting current international interweb traffic.

In this age of modernity (or thereabouts) we take it for granted that data is represented in the most efficient and assuredly, most visual of manners. Our power point presentations documented the hypothetical (and then very real) invasion of Iraq – our excel spreadsheets improperly, though with a flair for the aesthetically enlightened, organized and presented the market’s capacity for debt trading.

These novel and assuredly clever visualizations of the world’s data do much, but they do lack the elegance of John Thomson Edinburgh’s representations of the world’s rivers and mountains. Each one perfectly scales the length of the waterways, height of the mountains, relative volume of the river, and changes in course of the water.

Though Edinburgh’s illustrations approach art, their proportions, angles, and overall composition are provided purely by the Earth’s various measurements.

The only other representation of facts I have seen that lays out its subject so elegantly is the chart pictured below. It shows Napoleon’s Grand Armee heading towards Moscow in 1812 (represented in red) and the subsequently brutal return trip a year later with only 10,000 of a 422,000 man force.

The thickness represents troop numbers, direction the relative route taken including rivers and cities of importance, the length is scaled in proportional to the campaign’s mileage, and quite interestingly, the temperature face by the invading force is marked along the bottom. One can literally see the huge mass of Napoleon’s men fought not just by the Russians, but by the shear ardor of the required march and the increasingly hostile, frigid air.

There are some who try to keep things interesting in their mapping of data and hopefully, over time, there will be more of them. Over at strange maps, they try to document the most interesting forms of mapping. For words, there is the visual thesaurus, though it is lame having to pay for its features. That can be fixed here.