A page on Canada’s Open Data Portal got me interested in the Fur Trade in (and around) what we now call Canada. (link)
It also contains a map that uses colour, symbology and labels to identify Fur Trade posts based on who was the first owner, when it was started, how long it was active, etc. It’s a great map, and I quote from the site: “Contained within the 4th Edition (1974) of the Atlas of Canada is a map that shows locations of fur trading posts for the period 1600 to 1870.“
When I saw this map I really wanted to create a map with animation where you could see the progress of new fur trade posts, based on the first year of Operation. To do so I had to take the following steps:
– Georeference the map (align it with data with lat/lon locations)
– Digitize the locations with “real-world” lat/lon locations
– Add attribute data in a spreadsheet that can be linked to the digitized data from above
– Save all data in one file
– Visualize
After playing around with the data I got a general idea what I wanted to do. Unfortunately Tableau Public currently does not support Pages (animation) when publishing to the server, although I did see it is one of the new features coming to the new version of Tableau Desktop; hopefully it will be implemented for Tableau Public soon.
At some point I may create a GIF but for a now the user is going to have to click through the years manually. I also don’t like that I cannot change any style of the pages “buttons”, but so be it.
I used Gravit Designer to create the static part of the dashboard, and Mapbox to created my own stylized background map, in itself worthy of a blog post at some point.
I like the result (link to the live version), and after some more playing with the data, I may add one or more pages/tabs at a later stage.
Cheers!
