Spatial and Temporal Range of New World Publishing Sites, 1535-1800

This map shows the location of printing presses in the Americas from 1535 to 1800 whose products appear in the joint catalog of The Brown University Library and The John Carter Brown Library. The dots are sized based on the number of materials in the catalog, which may give a rough visual estimate of each location's published output.

You can interact with this visualization in a number of ways:

• Mouse over the map to see the full name of the nearest place and the number of works at Brown published there.
• Use the buttons below to zoom and pan across the map.
• Click on a location to see the books published there.
• The slider can either show rough cumulative publishing output by cliking "Single Slide" or publishing output within a date range set with "Double Slide."
• If you want to see how the mouseover chooses a location, click the "show Voronoi" check box. It will display the lines of the Voronoi Polygons. In one sense, they lines also demarcate "zones of printing" around each location. The current alogrithm does not take geopgraphy or the road network into account but still provides a useful overview.
• You can search for locations (but not books) by name in the search bar.

Built with the d3.js javascript library

Note on Visualization: If no blue dots appear on the map, click the RESET button.

This data set has known issues, but it is an attempt to show the range of publishing in North and South America. To see a cleaner, smaller data set, look at this map.

The Mapping Colonial Americas Publishing Project