Data collection.

I’ve started wearing a pedometer to track every step I take on this trip…so far: 70 miles of walking since arriving in Asia 10 days ago. [I'm thinking of doubling the miles hiked on the Great Wall, to account for the verticality, and doubling the 3 miles we walked with our packs from the Ulaanbaatar train station to downtown in the rain.] 

I’ve been thinking about the graphics I want to make that illustrate the data collecting I’m doing [temperatures, distances, bearings, etc], and it’s been on my mind especially since the VAF conference. Perhaps it’s because I’m an architect by training, but when I went to talks with the words “mapping” or “visualizing” or “modeling” or even “comparing,” “understanding,” or “analyzing,” I expected to see graphics. Building a map, or distilling and combining non-visual data into graphics, is in itself an analytical process, as well as illustrative. I wonder what historians’ research would be like if they teamed up with information designers? It might be like one of my favorite websites ever, www.historyshots.com, or it might be more interactive, like www.visualthesaurus.com. In any case, I think it’s fruitful to attempt both: clear, argument-building prose, and dense, coherent, analytical graphics.