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VIDEO: There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics - Talking Cartographic Data Visualization

Map collectors, dealers and experts are meeting this week in the Philippines at the 36th International IMCoS Symposium, held at the Manila Ayala Museum.
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This talk, recently given by Daniel Crouch of Daniel Crouch Rare Books during the 2018 San Francisco Map Fair, explores some of the earliest and greatest exponents of cartographic data visualization, including: “the best statistical graphic ever drawn” - a map depicting Napoleon’s doomed invasion of Russia; maps of the international cotton trade before, during and after the American Civil War; the first sociological maps of both the UK and USA; the first epidemiological map; and the first geological map, culminating in a discussion of the dispensation of “topographical truth” with Harry Beck’s famous map of the London Underground, a world standard for graphic clarity and as “rational as a contemporary Mondrian painting”, proving the American statistician John Tukey’s point that “the greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see”.

Daniel Crouch Rare Books, based in London, is a specialist dealer in antique atlases, maps, plans, sea charts and voyages dating from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries.
The firm is a member of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association, ABA and affiliated to the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, ILAB.

The 36th International IMCoS Symposium 2018 – Manila is organized and curated by the GALLERY OF PRINTS through Rudolf J. H. Lietz, IMCoS Representative Philippines, and presented by Ayala Museum and GALLERY OF PRINTS, supported by IMCoS, the International Map Collectors’ Society London, and PHIMCOS, the Philippine Map Collectors Society in Manila.

This video is reposted here with the permission of Daniel Crouch Rare Books.