This week I particularly enjoyed Ben Schmidt’s blog post. Two things struck me initially; the beauty of some of the visualizations (the first image on the blog entry could potentially be an artwork, in my opinion) and the type of data being visualized, ship’s logs are something that I had never imagined to be datasets.
That aside, what I really appreciated in the article was his idea that we need to reinvent the way historians do history. I think he is right in some respects, we automatically use the toolkit available to us, our tried and tested ways of doing things, and in this case our tools work for print media. But there are additional requirements in digital visualizations. His first step, ‘a source criticism that explains what’s in the data’ harks back to our discussions last week regarding the objectivity of data used to build timelines, and I think the same holds here. We, as viewers, automatically trust maps, as we do timelines. But with the proliferation of geographical visualizations (Yau mentions that the New York Times has a specific team dedicated to this, p.271) we should be thinking more deeply about the data behind them, where it comes from, how it was constructed, how (if) it has been altered, and any unintentional biases that may be embedded in its construct.
Just as Pascal Gielen used Bakhtin’s theory of chronopoty to make the case for the inclusion of multiple temporal narratives in the museum exhibition, Bodenhamer highlights the individual and collective experiences in geography and history. I was attracted by his idea of layering data in order to create a ‘deep map’ of the cultural heritage and memory of a specific location (p.27). Our Town Stories (Edinburgh) is one of Scotland’s best examples of projects like this. 
It uses a map as its underlying structure, different types of marker on the map indicate the type of data attributed to that point – historic photographs, maps, or text. The photographs superimpose the old upon the new, and allow you to control how much of each you see. By adding further layers to this such as oral histories, letters or paintings, it has the potential to capture a collective memory of Edinburgh whilst drawing comparisons with the modern city.
I also found the Ben Schmidt blog post really interesting and I thought the visualizations he provided gave me a much better understand of shipping routes that I had no understanding. However, the more I looked at them the more problematic I found them. For example, the first video he has to show “a year of early American shipping” gives the impression that there is practically a traffic jam because so much activity is going on. It made me realize that I still do not have a full view of what shipping was like. Were there so many ships moving simultaneous that they commonly saw one another on the open sea or was shipping extremely isolated as I have often thought of it in my mind?
I think the speed at which this is played out affects our interpretation, one year = one minute. This makes it seems as if there are ships zooming about the sea when in reality we know they would have been relatively slow moving by today’s standards. Also I suspect data plotting the routes has been smoothed to show a more linear journey. This together with the scale of the map, such that we can not see the details of individual journeys, does make it look very congested. Perhaps slowing the visualization in speed and looking at it on a smaller scale could give some answers?