Geographical presents the map that won first place in the Interactive category at the Information is Beautiful Awards this year. The website, shipmap.org, plots thousands of ships on their journey through canals, major rivers and the high seas: activity often well out of sight for the general public.
Duncan Clark and Robin Houston, the creative duo behind the prize-winning visualisation and founders of a new data visualisation platform said,
“It came to us via UCL and ExactEarth, but ultimately it comes from the ships themselves. It plots the broadcasts of vessels over one year – 2012. The University’s idea was to do a project on shipping and CO2, they showed us the data and asked us our opinion.
We said that although the carbon dioxide angle is important, it would be more compelling to plot this data to show just how massive the global shipping is. CO2 is a vital, though secondary, element to the industry as a whole.The idea that each of those coloured marks represents thousands of tonnage of ship is the main narrative here”
As you’d assume, we started with the oceans and the land as the two distinct areas of the map. And then we drew the ships on top and we very quickly realised that the ships penetrated deep inside the continents – you get these huge container ships going right up the Paraguay River, right up the Amazon River, and also deep into the Great Lakes by a combination of natural inlets and canals near Niagara Falls. That forced us to change the style of the map. We had to get new geographic datasets with all the rivers and then cut the rivers out of the land so that the ships within them made sense.
The next phase for that project is part of a much bigger change. Instead of making individual visualisations, they may make templates that other data gatherers can attach data to.
“Take the ship map template, for example. That tech has already been reused to plot the movements of the entire US trucking fleet based on US Census Bureau data. Often these bespoke graphics that people spend months making are thrown away once they have served their purpose, and everything has to be reinvented from scratch. The aim of flourish is to create templates that can be used for different data sets more than once. The tech can be reused lots of times to represent lots of different data.”
Source: Geographical
