The weaving path of opportunity

It's funny how things come together sometimes.

I have been considering what map I want to use for the Greater Northern War campaign. It needs sufficient detail for map movement, but not so much that it is overawing.

I had a search for a contemporary map (contemporary to the early 18thC, that is) that could do the trick. One looked promising.

Map of Europe in 1700 from Atlas Minor ou Briesve available online from the Royal Belgian Library.

Then I realised that it lacked sufficient detail. It and others in that atlas will be useful for reference though.

As will those from King George's Military Collection and the Digitales Archiv Marburg. None will do for a map for the campaign.

The idea of merging maps from contemporary boardgames (contemporary to us, that is) came up in discussion between Julian and me. Getting the scales to fit could be tricky, but the main negative is that I don't want to use hexes.

It seemed that the only answer was to draw my own.

Where to start?

I have a Rand McNally Atlas of World History that seemed a good starting point. None of the maps can be used directly as they have arrows and text relating to the points that are being made/period shown. So, again a useful resource, but not THE resource.

Then, I found that someone had drawn a blank map of Europe in 1700. Seemed marvellous!

Political map of Europe in 1700 (by a user hurricanehunter on DeviantArt).

All I had to do was to print it on a large sheet of paper and draw in the bits that I wanted... Hmmm. Perhaps not. What about if I used it as a background in my drawing package EasyDraw? Yeah, that would be better and easier. Or would it?

Oh dear, this was getting all too hard. Perhaps I would have to just use a hex map after all. Time to think about it for a bit.

Work came to the 'rescue'. I picked up a project that meant I had a lot to do in a short space of time, so no time to think about drawing maps (or even to paint figures).

Yet, opportunity weaves an interesting path.

As part of the project, I did some simple statistical analyses using R. Now, R is probably something most of you have never heard of. It is a computer language, developed from S and S plus, that is open source (i.e. completely free), and is supported by a huge community of people who develop packages for tasks related to data analysis, visualisation, manipulation... and more. In short, it is bloody amazing.

R is script-based, so can take time to work out, but, because of that, it is really flexible. There are loads and loads of examples on the web (back to that huge community).

Anyway, in addition to doing my bit of stats, I wanted to present a spatial representation of locations for the data, but one that was somewhat 'opaque'. I'd seen a graph done by a colleague in another project, where the locations of data points had been presented on axes of longitude and latitude. Brilliant.

Two-three hours of searching, finding options, changing script, getting errors, repeat and repeat and I had my graph.

What (the #@$!) does this have to do with my map for the campaign? In searching for how to do this, I found examples or how to draw graphs in R.

"Hang on a minute," I said. "I'll save those pages for later and see what they are about."

A brief version of 'later' came along and I looked at the examples on the web more closely. I was excited at the prospect. I even found a heap of publicly available shape files that would probably help with layers for my maybe, eventual map.

A bit more 'later' came today when I had finished the reports, so I decided to have a first pass at drawing a map.

This quick, first pass developed into several hours, but I am happy with progress and the prospect of having something functional, flexible and reproducible.

Following the steps in the example on the web and using the R package 'rnaturalearth' gave me this preliminary map (scaling a map of the world to show the bit that we need for this campaign).

I did not want the borders of the countries, which are modern. How to remove them? Too easy, as it turned out as it had been done for me. Simply use the set 'coastline' from the R Natural Earth collection. Overlaying the rivers and lakes took a bit of search, try, fail, search, try again, but I got there!

One overlay done, I was off. Mountain areas from the European Environmental Agency (probably too coarse, so I'll have to keep looking).

I need some cities. What had I done wrong? Ah, this was only a sample file. Not public domain, they want payment for this set of data circa 1700.

The free World Cities dataset worked, just a few too many!!

Making them grey is a nicer look, but still too many. No matter. I can edit the Excel file and reload it as a shape file (or just make my own from scratch).

That was enough for now.

 

Happy with progress so far and having a way to improve what I have—edit the cities, try to find a file with a better representation of the mountains—it is time to turn in.

 

Good night.