Stanford Spatial History Project

Demic Atlas Visualization and Geospatial Data

Article-Grid, Cartography, Demic Atlas, Economic Geography, Featured, World / By Martin W. Lewis

An interactive visualization of the Demic Atlas is now available on the website of the Stanford Spatial History Project, thanks to the unceasing efforts of Anne Fredell and Jake Coolidge. By clicking on the grey boxes on the page, one can toggle back and forth between demic and state-based world maps of per capita GDP and HDI. A link to the geospatial database used to construct these maps can be found at the same site. Click here to go directly to the database, located at geocommons.

The Stanford Spatial History website contains a number of interesting articles, maps, and visualizations, and I would urge readers to explore the site. Stanford University is deeply committed to the “digital humanities,” developing technologically mediated methods of exploring the traditional concerns of history and the arts. I would especially recommend the projects developed by the faculty leaders of the Spatial History Lab, Richard White and Zephyr Frank. Professor White’s venture, “Shaping the West,” focuses largely on railroads in the western United States, but delves into a number of related issues. Professor Frank’s work on Rio de Janeiro, “The Terrain of History,” includes a number of particularly intriguing and innovative visualizations.

Content Map

About GeoCurrents

GeoCurrents is dedicated to exploring the geographical and historical patterns that underlie the world’s current events and that structure global and regional relationships. Maps are used in all posts not merely to show where events occur, but also to illustrate the processes involved.

GeoCurrents tries to avoid taking sides on contentious issues, seeking rather to foster an enriching exchange of information and ideas. As its scope is both fully global and deeply historical, the author is usually operating outside of his own fields of expertise. As a result, mistakes and simplifications can be expected. Corrections and elaborations are more than welcome in the comments section. Comments with insulting or abusive language, however, will be deleted.

Readers interested in opinion-based essays by Martin W. Lewis will be able to find them on his personal webpage [currently under preparation].

For more about GeoCurrents and its author, please visit this page.

About The Author

Martin W. Lewis is senior lecturer emeritus at Stanford University, where he taught world history and world geography from 2002 to 2022. He earned a PhD in geography from the University of California at Berkeley in 1988, and previously taught at George Washington University and Duke University. A list of his published works will soon be made available on his personal website [currently under preparation].

GeoCurrents’ Conceptual Concerns

GeoCurrents is concerned about almost anything that has a geographical expression and hence can be explored and elucidated through maps. Topics of interest range from the deadly serious to the quirky and whimsical.

Many GeoCurrents posts take on issues of political geography, ranging from wars and ethnic conflicts to electoral returns. Behind these writings is a conviction that the basic world political map is unduly simplistic, making the world seem much more orderly than it really is. A book-length elaboration of this thesis – entitled Seduced by the Map – will be available on the author’s personal webpage by the end of 2023, if not earlier. The introduction and initial chapters on this book can be found on this website. A summary of the main arguments in Seduced by the Map can be found here.

Recent Posts

Posts by Topic