100 Years of ships

Ben Schmidt took data from ship’s logs to make a visualization of ocean traffic between 1750 and 1850. It is not meant to be comprehensive, as logs from many nations are not represented, and traffic on the Pacific is lost due to the orientation of the globe. But it’s still an interesting way to see how world exploration and trade progressed through the period. Schmidt also made another video showing just one year of traffic in more detail. See it and read about how this project was done at Sapping Attention. Link -via Metafilter