The 3D Map Project:
The Secession Editorials and the Press, 1860

As part of the process of preparing materials for the our Editorials on Secession Web site, it seemed useful (and of course, necessary for the course requirements) to plot the two maps in our spatial arrangement in a way that would highlight quantitative relationships, and also position the data points on a map of the period (instead of the contemporary map used by MapPoint).

After an initial failed effort to model the map in clay (rollover in Figure 1), I decided to use the map of the U.S. in 1860 that I prepared in Illustrator as the surface for plotting the data. This was glued on to a piece of foam board and then carefully trimmed with a razor blade to give the whole thing a nice raised effect. The map was then pasted onto a square board which served as a background and place holder for the title and legend information. We then crosstabulated the two databases—the editorials on secession table, and the list of newspapers in 1860—to produce a list of quantities in each town and city. This simple crosstabulation highlighted some crucial things that weren't apparent when the data was plotted on two separate maps—most notably, that the Library of Congress's holdings, which we were using as a point of comparison, were not as comprehensive as we had hoped.

As the final map demonstrates, there are a number of points where the LC holdings list didn't include newspapers in the editorials series, evidenced by those points that are all in red.. Moreover, the physical act of plotting these points reinforced the sense of how compact the data in the Northeast truly is. Even using a rough radius of 50 miles to consolidate towns and cities in close proximity to one another, it became almost impossible to get these things down into the board in the region extending from Philadelphia to Boston. It also proved more difficult than expected to plot these data points on the map-plotting each of these little towns and cities on a map proved more time-consuming than we'd initially imagined, so it served as a useful lesson in U.S. geography and preparation for plotting these points again on the animated map in our final project. The map also highlights the quantitative relationships between the two data sets, indicating that the Boston area, for instance is somewhat underrepresented as the ratio of editorials in the series to the numbers in the series is almost 1 to 1 (22 newspapers and 27 editorials). In comparison, the ratio for New Orleans is 1 to 6 (11 newspapers and 66 editorials), and New York with a more than 1 to 2 ratio (31 newspapers and 73 editorials).

Perhaps more troubling, for the purposes of mapmaking—8 data points had a negative ratio. Fort Wayne, Vicksburg, Greenfield, Worcester, Rochester, Charleston [West] Virginia, Burlington, Montpelier were anomolous among the 285 data points for having a negative ratio between the number of newspapers collected and the number of editorials published—with more (something we didn't anticipate when we started this little project.