1. Jason Kottke posted it to his weblog. Either you know about Kottke or you don't. Many journalists do. He's an authentic low-key tastemaker.
2. I shared the map on Flickr with a CC by-SA license. Which meant any publication could republish it for free without even asking me.
I'm still a little embarrassed about it. The map is pretty simple. The visualization is highly misleading and has all sorts of ugly visual artifacts. That Daily Mail article is full of mistakes (including misspelling my name three different ways.) The picture wasn't even really my goal, it was just a debugging workprint off my "real" project, a GitHub repo teaching people how to make maps in Javascript with vector tiles. But the picture looked cool and was easy to understand.
But I'm also proud of the result. It did look cool! And the recognition pleased my vanity. If I wanted I could have landed several years of consulting work off the momentary fame, I had all sorts of requests for custom work based on it. My favorite outcome was the artist Tamsie River took the data, made a giant mold, and poured a hot iron cast of the Mississippi watershed. I'm still sorry I didn't go for the event. https://tamsie.com/River%20of%20Iron.html
My map of the most frequent occupational surnames in Europe [1] also went viral in 2015. When I posted it on Reddit, newspapers from Ireland (they asked me for permission to reprint it) to Greece (nobody else asked) and countless people on Facebook republished it. Well, everybody has a surname, an occupation, and a country.
Late advice: when making a viral image, put your URL on it :-)
Thanks! The GitHub project is still available but is many years out of date now. I did this when vector tiles were new, there's now really good software packages out there. Some of the ideas of cleaning and simplifying the data may still be useful though.
@GP: It's never too late to post old stuff in HN if it's interesting. Just add (2013) to the title here. It can also be a post mortem, with the extendd story in your comment, a few maps and the explanations of the main suggested improvements.
I read this as virility and expected something very different. So I'm going to comment as though it said "Virility in cartography".
A virile map has monsters, and beckons a boy to grab his stick (gleaming steel) and hop aboard the patio (great ship with full sails) and set the neighborhood alight in delight fighting pirates.
He devises elaborate dilemmas and improvises wilely against his barbarous captors, even as the governors of his native country conspire against him, or wonders what strange countries lie just beyond the edge of the words "the known world".
Or maybe the sea is made of stars, and he envisions gayly springtime planets, or dark winter stars that become dragons across the nebulae.
Idk, even then, maybe there's a frontier beyond the final one - where consciousness melts between the fabrics of little realities, each with their own cutely crafted logic, and he drifts to a new dream where 1 + 1 is 3 and it only makes sense that way.
Idk. ChatGPT raised me and I'm afraid I'm becoming my father, who then will I raise to look like me? If only I had a map of the ages to not fear myself.
I assume the virality of that map comes down to Tufte.
It's actually an interesting map/graphic. It paints a dramatic story but you really have to study it. Probably wouldn't fly in a newspaper or typical magazine.
I remember a story a number of years back that showed complex relationships in Afghanistan in intricate detail. Similar sort of deal.
Yes, Tufte did much to popularize the Minard map related to Napoleon, but there were map dealers that had been intrigued by it and discussing it for quite a while prior to that. Those discussions can leak into academia and pollinate a whole new batch of discussions.
Virality as part of the ebb and flow of popular culture is interesting. But, we find it as interesting when an old map will somehow drift through the pace layers of culture and become a discussion point. That resurfacing of an older map could allude to deeper issues and mechanisms that are ongoing.
You see those dwindling circles of Bison population and it hits you that not only could this be reoccurring, but perhaps the disappearance of other species could have similar cascading reactions. Some have pointed out that with the loss of the primary food source of the Bison, friction with settlers escalated quickly. It also had huge impacts in the soil of the West. Maybe the dust bowl wouldn't have been as cataclysmic.
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Unfortunately we're concerned that even viral maps can be lost over time. They become dead links. And somehow even the wonderful people at Internet Archive can't save everything.
This is part of why we push cartographers we know to print something they've done at the end of each year. Paper is astoundingly enduring. If there was one map that you did and it resonates with you, please print it out. Build a small portfolio of hard copies over the next few years. Your work is worth printing!
Two things made it go viral.
1. Jason Kottke posted it to his weblog. Either you know about Kottke or you don't. Many journalists do. He's an authentic low-key tastemaker.
2. I shared the map on Flickr with a CC by-SA license. Which meant any publication could republish it for free without even asking me.
I'm still a little embarrassed about it. The map is pretty simple. The visualization is highly misleading and has all sorts of ugly visual artifacts. That Daily Mail article is full of mistakes (including misspelling my name three different ways.) The picture wasn't even really my goal, it was just a debugging workprint off my "real" project, a GitHub repo teaching people how to make maps in Javascript with vector tiles. But the picture looked cool and was easy to understand.
But I'm also proud of the result. It did look cool! And the recognition pleased my vanity. If I wanted I could have landed several years of consulting work off the momentary fame, I had all sorts of requests for custom work based on it. My favorite outcome was the artist Tamsie River took the data, made a giant mold, and poured a hot iron cast of the Mississippi watershed. I'm still sorry I didn't go for the event. https://tamsie.com/River%20of%20Iron.html