Hiiii! I missed you guys! I hope this means I'm back, but each day is a surprising new adventure in Medical Land, so who knows what tomorrow will bring. But I'm going to try to read through the backlog of comments before bed and hopefully reply to a few. I also have a backlog of topics I want to discuss, haha, because of course I do.
But before I start rereading comments, I'm going to share a couple things with you that I put together in the last day or two. One I'll do in the Algarotti thread, and the other here.
So remember when selenak shared with us a map of Wilhelmine's itinerary on her trip to France and Italy? And I said I wanted one for Fritz, but like every month of his life?
Well, it occurred to me that you could put together a pretty good approximation from his correspondence. It's obviously going to be very light on the early years, especially pre-1730. You'd have to do that manually. But after 1740, we have reams and reams of correspondence for him, and it all comes with locations.
So I, uh, wrote some code. Like I do.
Then it turned out that code is easy, data wrangling is hard. (This is the mantra of data scientists everywhere.) In our case, data wrangling = converting the 18th century German names of cities into 21st century German, Polish, and Czech names with standardized spellings, and getting the latitude and longitude manually for the really small and obscure ones. Ahahahaaaa.
So I went with his personal correspondence for my first stab at this project. It gives you much less granularity than the political correspondence, but a much smaller and therefore more manageable data set, and it also gives you some of the 1730-1740 period.
I ended up manually googling 150 names that I couldn't automatically match to any modern place names. Some of them were pretty damn hard to track down. In a few cases, I had to go read the letter in question to figure out where the fuck he was, or his memoirs. Fortunately, in the one case where I absolutely could not find a modern equivalent even after reading the letter and would have been stumped, he conveniently described his location in the letter as "near this city, on this river, and just on the opposite side of this other river from this other city," which meant I could get fairly precise coordinates even without being able to match up names. Thanks, Fritz! His memoirs were actually pretty useful too in giving geographical descriptions. But you can see why I used the personal correspondence.
That got me a rough map of his travels 1730-1786. Or at least a data set that allows me to generate rough maps. Attempting to generate one single map crashed my laptop.
Then I picked out one small period and went through it by hand and attempted to clean up the data as best I could. (Some guesses have been made, but the final result doesn't have him jumping to the other side of Germany and back overnight, which is how I'm judging "good enough".) Now it looks like an actual map.
But he moved around and backtracked so much, that it would be unreadable as a static map with overlapping names and dates. So I made it into a gif.
And without further ado, behold the First Silesian War! (You'll need to click on the gif and zoom in to make out the text. Depending on your connection, the transitions may be a little jerky if you view it in the cloud, but when I downloaded it to my computer, it was much better quality. It's in the same folder as the screenshots, so you should be able to view it, but let me know if not.)
If we wanted to tackle this project properly, this would be my todo list: 1) Clean up the entire data set, 1730-1786. 2) Make the map all pretty with colors and better titles and stuff. 3) Use the political correspondence, omg. 4) Maybe see if it would be possible to make static maps covering short time frames that aren't unreadably cluttered?
What I should do is the initial number crunching on the political correspondence just to see exactly how much work it would be to make that data set usable. Would it be a couple hundred place names that needed to be manually wrangled (doable), or a couple thousand (lol no)?
Oh, btw, you know the 46 volumes of political correspondence? They stop in March 1782! I don't know what happened to the last 4.5 years. Maybe everyone who was compiling his correspondence died of old age and forgot to name literary executors, haha.
But anyway, enjoy watching Fritz invade Silesia and Bohemia in the meantime! ("Pragmatic Sanction? What Pragmatic Sanction? Anti-Machiavel? What Anti-Machiavel? *shifty eyes* Posterity is going to make MAPS commemorating this!")
Also: "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." I certainly learned a lot about Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic from this exercise. To the point where I'm starting to have intuitions about what's been misgeocoded just from proximity to surprisingly obscure villages and rivers. :P
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Fritz chronological maps, or a labor of love
Date: 2019-11-15 10:24 am (UTC)But before I start rereading comments, I'm going to share a couple things with you that I put together in the last day or two. One I'll do in the Algarotti thread, and the other here.
So remember when
Well, it occurred to me that you could put together a pretty good approximation from his correspondence. It's obviously going to be very light on the early years, especially pre-1730. You'd have to do that manually. But after 1740, we have reams and reams of correspondence for him, and it all comes with locations.
So I, uh, wrote some code. Like I do.
Then it turned out that code is easy, data wrangling is hard. (This is the mantra of data scientists everywhere.) In our case, data wrangling = converting the 18th century German names of cities into 21st century German, Polish, and Czech names with standardized spellings, and getting the latitude and longitude manually for the really small and obscure ones. Ahahahaaaa.
So I went with his personal correspondence for my first stab at this project. It gives you much less granularity than the political correspondence, but a much smaller and therefore more manageable data set, and it also gives you some of the 1730-1740 period.
I ended up manually googling 150 names that I couldn't automatically match to any modern place names. Some of them were pretty damn hard to track down. In a few cases, I had to go read the letter in question to figure out where the fuck he was, or his memoirs. Fortunately, in the one case where I absolutely could not find a modern equivalent even after reading the letter and would have been stumped, he conveniently described his location in the letter as "near this city, on this river, and just on the opposite side of this other river from this other city," which meant I could get fairly precise coordinates even without being able to match up names. Thanks, Fritz! His memoirs were actually pretty useful too in giving geographical descriptions. But you can see why I used the personal correspondence.
That got me a rough map of his travels 1730-1786. Or at least a data set that allows me to generate rough maps. Attempting to generate one single map crashed my laptop.
Then I picked out one small period and went through it by hand and attempted to clean up the data as best I could. (Some guesses have been made, but the final result doesn't have him jumping to the other side of Germany and back overnight, which is how I'm judging "good enough".) Now it looks like an actual map.
But he moved around and backtracked so much, that it would be unreadable as a static map with overlapping names and dates. So I made it into a gif.
And without further ado, behold the First Silesian War! (You'll need to click on the gif and zoom in to make out the text. Depending on your connection, the transitions may be a little jerky if you view it in the cloud, but when I downloaded it to my computer, it was much better quality. It's in the same folder as the screenshots, so you should be able to view it, but let me know if not.)
If we wanted to tackle this project properly, this would be my todo list:
1) Clean up the entire data set, 1730-1786.
2) Make the map all pretty with colors and better titles and stuff.
3) Use the political correspondence, omg.
4) Maybe see if it would be possible to make static maps covering short time frames that aren't unreadably cluttered?
What I should do is the initial number crunching on the political correspondence just to see exactly how much work it would be to make that data set usable. Would it be a couple hundred place names that needed to be manually wrangled (doable), or a couple thousand (lol no)?
Oh, btw, you know the 46 volumes of political correspondence? They stop in March 1782! I don't know what happened to the last 4.5 years. Maybe everyone who was compiling his correspondence died of old age and forgot to name literary executors, haha.
But anyway, enjoy watching Fritz invade Silesia and Bohemia in the meantime! ("Pragmatic Sanction? What Pragmatic Sanction? Anti-Machiavel? What Anti-Machiavel? *shifty eyes* Posterity is going to make MAPS commemorating this!")
Also: "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." I certainly learned a lot about Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic from this exercise. To the point where I'm starting to have intuitions about what's been misgeocoded just from proximity to surprisingly obscure villages and rivers. :P