Mapped: British, Spanish and Dutch Shipping 1750-1800 by James Cheshire.
From the post:
I recently stumbled upon a fascinating dataset which contains digitised information from the log books of ships (mostly from Britain, France, Spain and The Netherlands) sailing between 1750 and 1850. The creation of this dataset was completed as part of the Climatological Database for the World’s Oceans 1750-1850 (CLIWOC) project. The routes are plotted from the lat/long positions derived from the ships’ logs. I have played around with the original data a little to clean it up (I removed routes where there was a gap of over 1000km between known points, and only mapped to the year 1800). As you can see the British (above) and Spanish and Dutch (below) had very different trading priorities over this period. What fascinates me most about these maps is the thousands (if not millions) of man hours required to create them. Today we churn out digital spatial information all the time without thinking, but for each set of coordinates contained in these maps a ship and her crew had to sail there and someone had to work out a location without GPS or reliable charts.
Truly awesome display of data! You will have to see the maps to appreciate it.
Note the space between creation and use of the data. Over two hundred (200) years.
“Stable” URIs are supposed to be what? Twelve (12) to fifteen (15) years?
What older identifiers can you think of? (Hint: Ask a librarian.)