> Maps and spacial diagrams [...] allow us to see information from a different perspective, showing us connections and relations that would likely escape us, to visualise data in its spacial context.

This is one reason why drawing skills are important: the ability to express ideas from a visual perspective.

I think that art class in school should have a drafting/mapmaking/formal drawing component. Also...don't get rid of art class.

You guys might like the videos from Johnny Harris - mostly about maps, https://www.youtube.com/@johnnyharris

Beautiful information, but I can't help but think that this makes a subtle mistake in visualizing geographic information -- the thought that it needs to be on a map. This then creates the dependency that this then needs some kind of time animation and a slider, and all that other stuff.

This data is really quantity vs time (histograms), and the display could just as easily be a few (8 actually) static graphics aligned by date, a whole bunch for each city, or some selectable set of cities. Normalizing the data by population at the time would be an interesting addition.

(e.g. the second example here where each histogram is it's own sub graph https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40067781/plotting-aligne...)

What we get right now to get information from this is the need to slowly advance the slider and compare across the map to answer the main questions:

- Where did printing first appear in this data?

- Where did it next appear?

- Are there surprising geographic jumps (e.g. HRE to Italy) - right no I know it's between 1450 and 1500, but I don't know the exact year.

- Why did some areas lag?

- Where there any unexpectedly large or small areas?

- Any areas that grew unexpectedly quickly (Britain sometime near 1650) or dropped off unexpectedly quickly?

These are really hard to answer with the present vis, but would be trivial with just an aligned stack of histograms. And the answers to some of these then naturally lead to a number of interesting secondary questions that mostly start with "why?"

note I've seen a similar issue when trying to figure out how to display the movement of things between fixed locations like cities (without a specified route). Everybody always tries to draw lines on the map between the points and then frets over how to show the sequencing. The answer is to just make a classic sequence diagram (the sequence is the important part of the visualization not the map), where the columns are the locations and the arrow or lines of travel simply shows the path between the locations. Train schedule diagrams do this, but usually rotated horizontally (https://virginian.mdodd.com/string_diag.html) The lines can then be annotated with all kinds of other stuff because they aren't being overloaded imperfectly carrying sequencing information.