Following on my last post about choropleth maps and regional densities, here are a couple of quick figures showing specific named locations at the city level and below (‘bare’ mentions of nations and regions/states alone are excluded) in the same nineteenth-century literary corpus, scaled by number of occurrences:

The biggies are New York, D.C., Boston, London, Paris, etc. Compare this to the log version, which seemed more useful in the density case:

Looks to me like the log version is less clear for this type of figure.

A few notes:

1. These figures include all the texts from 1851-75; still working on year-by-year figures and an animation. Won’t be hard.

2. A couple of things to check out in the near future. (a.) How does the density of named localities compare to that of named regions and nations? Consider Africa in particular, where there’s decent national density in some cases, but perhaps less geographic specificity. (b.) I need to produce a state-level density map that subtracts some measure of population from the number of named location mentions to get a sense of which states received a disproportionate share of literary attention.

3. These maps were produced using the ‘maps’ package in R. Really simple to use. Method cribbed from Nathan Yau’s Visualize This.

4. The top few cities: