Visualizing Overland Travel, When All Roads Led to Rome
Part 7 in a series on global information design exploring the history of road transportation diagrams
3.1 Transportation on the Road
All forms of transportation diagrams, regardless of the type of travel involved, are designs that assist the viewer to perform a universal task: getting from here to there. The purpose of the visualization is to support travel decisions. It is not so much a question of the technology as it is where the transportation takes place. This post will look at the history of visualizations for overland travel. The posts that follow will examine sea and air travel, and how we find our way through urban transportation networks.
Transportation diagrams are visually distinct from geographic maps. As the following examples will illustrate, geography can be secondary, problematic or entirely unnecessary when visualizing a transportation network.
Road maps are the link between the nodes. The attributes of the links represent the type of road. The attributes of each node represented the identity of villages, towns, and cities. Between and around these nodes we find landmarks and obstacles that must be crossed, such as rivers or mountains. Whether we are traveling by foot, by animal or by vehicle, these are the basic design elements that provide information to support overland travel.
