Volume visualization - The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure - page 251

Places exist temporarily as well as spatially. Over the years people move
home; over the decades new homes are built and old ones decay; over the cen-
turies towns are formed and decline (Figure 9.2). An animation of the national
boundaries of the European continent over the last four hundred years would
show near continuous turmoil. Nations exist only as pockets in space and time,
as also, in the long run, does the world system of nation states. Regions coalesce,
fragment and disappear.
The plate tectonics of human geography is a violent spectacle. Even the
patterns of spatial inequality can alter in the space of a few dozen years. We can
never appreciate why something is if we do not look at how it came to be and
what it is becoming. 4
The theme of unemployment has arisen at several points in this topic. Unem-
ployment as a national phenomenon has a well-defined spacetime geography.
It did not exist in Britain, or almost anywhere in the world, as a recognised
phenomenon prior to 1888. 5 Ninety years later is had risen, fallen and was just
starting to rise again. Monthly records have been kept by the eight hundred and
fifty-two amalgamated office areas for every month since 1978 (and for every
ward since 1983). Over one hundred and fifty temporal observations constitute a
dimension in the above sense. How then to view this information?
In the research work undertaken that resulted in this topic many attempts
were made to show the spatial structure of unemployment over time; some have
been mentioned in the previous chapter. The structure was just too complicated
for a few views into a spacetime block to uncover (Figures 9.3 and 9.4), so
a series of time-slices were drawn, one for each year since the series began.
To highlight the changes, deviations from the expected value were calculated,
knowing the average for the year and the place. If this had not been done, the
changes over these twelve years would not have been visually apparent. Similar
problems were encountered when trying to show house price change in a single
image (Figure 9.5).
Twelve cartograms of unemployment were created for this topic using both
counties and amalgamated office areas to show how spatial resolution changed
the image (both are shown earlier, using circles and hexagons respectively). One
picture was drawn a year, partly because that is all that would fit on the paper
4 Appreciation of spacetime requires us to take an unfamiliar vantage point: 'My world is, in
the last analysis, the sum total of my sensations. Sensations can be most naturally arranged as a
pattern in four-dimensional spacetime. My life is a sort of four-dimensional worm embedded in a
block universe. To complain that my lifeworm is only (let us say) seventy-two years long is perhaps
foolish as it would be to complain that my body is only six feet long. Eternity is right outside
of spacetime. Eternity is right now' (Rucker, 1984, p. 136). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Dr Rucker is
related to the philosopher Hegel and so far his lifeworm is doing fine, but he is not yet 72; see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Rucker.
5 Understanding that people did not lack work through their own failure was a huge step forward
in the 1880s. Before relief for unemployment began people faced starvation, the workhouse or doing
any job no matter how demeaning or low paid (Dorling, 2011, p.15).