You’ll soon be able to cruise around a map of green tech history in America and scroll through a timeline of the major events in the history of the industry.
Right now, I’m working on building an American Green Technology Historical Registry that will mark out the places that have been important for wind, solar, hydrokinetic, geothermal, and other renewable power sources. You will be surprised when you see the results. It’s not just northern California, it’s Ohio and Boise, Florida and Death Valley, Texas and Montana, York, PA, and Rutland, Vermont.
The map would be farther along if it weren’t so hard to find a good mapping application. I guess I’ve settled on just using Google Maps, but if you’ve got a great tool, let me know.
I also want you to be able to look through the history in other formats. I’m thinking about building a Dipity timeline that would let you see pictures and stories, but I’m toying with simpler formats, too, like a simple list filled with pictures. Any preferences?
January 2, 2009 at 2:57 pm
This is a fantastic project, and I wish you the best of luck in completing it. I wish I had a good mapping tool to suggest.
January 3, 2009 at 11:18 am
Really glad to have discovered this wonderful blog. Fascinating historical materials. Look forward to reading your book!
January 4, 2009 at 12:35 am
Great project. You should look at the work of Stamen, http://www.stamen.com/maps they do fascinating work with mapping and data visualization – they might be a good place to start.
January 4, 2009 at 1:17 am
@Marri and Jette: Thanks for the encouragement! It’s what keeps me going when I get home from my day job and have to sit down and write for another 4 hours.
@Mark: Stamen is awesome. My girlfriend has actually been talking with their head guy for a project that she’s working on. For now, I want to keep the project in-house (I can’t really offer any money or acclaim just yet) but once I’ve assembled all the data, I’d love to get a real data visualization person to come in and make things actually look good.
January 5, 2009 at 4:48 am
Great preoject!
Would be interesting to cluster information by types of energy source, dependency of inventions on each other, application of the inventions, market success.
have a look at visualcomplexity.com and infosthetics.com for inspiration.