HOME //
ABOUT //
OLD MAPS //
POPULATION DOTS //
WATER MANAGEMENT PROJECTS



About the Project

‘Exposing the Voids’ was created to shed light on Dutch open data that is often not used or not easily accessible. The Netherlands has an incredible amount of open data available for the public, but there exists no clear data hierarchy, resulting in a lot of data being snowed under by the sheer number of datasets that is available. By using these datasets and displaying them in a novel way, ‘Exposing the Voids’ hopes to inspire people to think about the politics behind data accessibility and if something like having access to too much data exists. The project consists of three maps, each of them with a focus on a different topic, but all data sets are related to the Netherlands.

> Old Maps

The ‘Old Maps’ page uses a dynamic scrolling structure to show the metamorphosis of the shape of the Netherlands over the past 400 years. Rather than showing the transformation of a specific part of the country, or showing a historical map, these images are extracted from shapefiles that were created for the purpose of this project. By displaying the country as a whole, with only the shape changing from map to map, the user can focus on the shape of the country without being distracted by the different cartographic layouts from the historical maps. For the purpose of this project, the focus of the metamorphosis was on the changing coastline and land reclamation projects over time, not on the border of the Netherlands with its neighbouring countries. For each map, a historical map of the Netherlands was used and georectified in GIS software. After the rectification of the map, a recent shapefile of the Netherlands was layered on top of the map and the shape was adjusted to the shape of the historical map using the layer editor.

> Population Dots

The ‘Population Dots’ page uses demographic data from the Dutch CBS (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek) and the geographical boundaries of ‘buurten’, as defined by CBS to generate random population dots within the boundaries of ‘buurten’ for the entire country. Inspired by the Racial Dot Map Racial Dot Map for the United States, the dots on this map represent 50 persons per dot, with the colour of the dot making a distinction between different migration backgrounds. Unlike the United States, the Netherlands does not collect data based on people’s self-identified race. Rather, the country uses the categories ‘no migration background’, ‘western migration background’, and ‘non-western migration background’. See here for an explanation of these categories.
By clicking on a point in the map, demographic statistics are pulled from the data sets to show how many people with each respective migration background live within a 7 kilometer radius of where the user clicked.

> Water Management Projects

The ‘Water Management Projects’ page is an attempt to centralize information about Dutch engineers and architect conducting water infrastructure, land reclamation, and sea level rise adaptation projects abroad. The Netherlands is proud of its water management industry, but except for news articles there is no accessible central database of ongoing and finished projects. By crowdsourcing data and using historical sources, this map will be an ongoing compilation of water management projects.
The orange dots on the map were all sourced from Johan van Veen’s “Dredge, Drain Reclaim: the Art of a Nation”, which was published in 1955 and includes a variety of maps and data visualizations about Dutch land reclamation practices, both in the Netherlands and abroad.
The blue dots on the map are crowdsourced from news articles and suggestions from the page’s visitors. Before a blue dot appears on the map, it is fact checked and verified by the moderator.

Data Sources



About the Author

This project was developed by Claudia Rot. Claudia is an almost graduate from the Design and Urban Ecologies program at Parsons, The New School. She uses data visualization and cartography to reframe and communicate environmental and climate justice issues.

This project is a component of Claudia's graduate thesis project 'Beyond Polderen: Exposing the Voids of Environmental Justice in the Netherlands', which will be added to this page as soon as it is finished.

Beta Version*

This project is still in a beta version. The user experience will be further developed during multiple feedback rounds which will happen in the summer and fall of 2019.