1740 and All That

So remember when selenak shared with us a map of Wilhelmine's itinerary on her trip to France and Italy? [Original write-up here, revised edition ported to rheinsberg here.] And I said I wanted one for Fritz, but like every month of his life?

Well, it occurred to me that you could put together a pretty good approximation from his correspondence. It's obviously going to be very light on the early years, especially pre-1730. You'd have to do that manually. But after 1740, we have reams and reams of correspondence for him, and it all comes with locations.

So I, uh, wrote some code. Like I do.

Then it turned out that code is easy, data wrangling is hard. (This is the mantra of data scientists everywhere.) In our case, data wrangling = converting the 18th century German names of cities into 21st century German, Polish, and Czech names with standardized spellings, and getting the latitude and longitude manually for the really small and obscure ones. Ahahahaaaa.

I ended up manually googling ~500 names that I couldn't automatically match to any modern place names. Some of them were pretty damn hard to track down. In a few cases, I had to go read the letter in question to figure out where the fuck he was, or his memoirs. Fortunately, in the one case where I absolutely could not find a modern equivalent even after reading the letter and would have been stumped, he conveniently described his location in the letter as "near this city, on this river, and just on the opposite side of this other river from this other city," which meant I could get fairly precise coordinates even without being able to match up names. Thanks, Fritz! His memoirs were actually pretty useful too in giving geographical descriptions.

The data before 1740 is incredibly sparse, so I started with his accession.

Then it turned out that there was way too much data for 1740 onward to fit comfortably onto one map, so I made it into a video and put it on Youtube.


( Finicky details that are in the Youtube description )