What Dynamic Mapping Reveals About War

Dynamic Mapping means showing a subject through both space and time.  While a geographic map shows a subject at a point in time (using picture), a dynamic map must be a moving picture (hence a movie).  Here are a few examples.  The first is World War II in Europe.

Did you get a sense that most of the time the war was static with periods of battle and change? Here’s World War I. We think mostly of the Western Front but just look at what was going on in the Balkan Front and in the Eastern Front.

Now here is the U.S. Civil War.

Wasn’t this a particularly static war in terms of territory conquered? This map does show the limits of this technique. It show the paths Sharman’s marches through Georgia and then through the Carolinas as Union controlled territories whereas his whole idea was not to occupy territory but to destroy property. Mapping is not the right tool to show that.

What these three maps do tell us about the big wars is that most of the time territory does not change hands.

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Find more maps like this here.