It's only a game: using interactive graphics middleware to visualise historical data

This paper reports on the author's recent research into family-level mapping using data from manuscript notebooks compiled in the late nineteenth century by Charles Booth, author of the ground-breaking study of poverty in London: Labour and Life of the People. Using Booth's original data, the paper suggests ways in which recent visualisation technologies can be used to provide insights into historical data. In particular, it reports on the use of state-of-the-art videogame technology to develop an interactive 3-D visualisation engine to display point-located social data. The paper describes the software, its advantages and disadvantages for visualising historical data, and reports how it resolves a widespread and vexing problem in thematic mapping.