maritime-voyages.tsv
21,649 rows1.89 MB
Rowboat Guide
Map and animate data automatically.
With Rowboat, it takes less than a minute
to go from opening 21,649 rows of commercial
shipping data to exploring an interactive map
of those ships traveling around the world,
revealing trade routes and regions of interest.
Open in Rowboat
Ellory
Yacht Mechanic
This may seem obvious, but mapping geographic data is one of the easiest ways to understand it.
Seeing where exactly in the world something is happening is infinitely more useful than trying to make sense of a pair of numeric coordinates, and having a way to instantly see how time and space relate to your dataset as a whole is incredibly helpful during the exploratory phase of working with new information.
Our dataset tracks the shipping routes of over 500 commercial vessels. Opening the file, we can see that it contains latitude and longitude columns.
By linking the latitude and longitude columns together, we can immediately see each ship location plotted on a world map.
We can also see that this dataset contains a datetime column, so we should have a timestamp for each pair of coordinates. Looking at the Range summary, we can also note that these dates cover a period of two months.
Clicking the ↔ arrow in the header, we can expand the world map into its own view.
To visualize all ship locations on any given date, we can click the See this map over time button and choose the datetime column in the dropdown menu.
This selection gives us a bird’s-eye-view of all 572 vessels moving across the world over this two month period. From here, the individual shipping routes of each vessel start to take shape.
As this is shipping data, most of the vessel coordinates fall where you’d expect: out on the ocean or docked near major port cities.
However, there is a cluster of dots that forms a path noticeably far inland in South America, where ships are traveling up and down the Amazon River.
Guided by this observation, we can narrow down our search to discover more about Amazon River shipping routes.
Within our linked latitude and longitude header map, we can click and drag to select the area around the river, which applies a filter and zooms the map to that area.
To get a more detailed look into what’s going on, we can add information about each individual ship as a hover state.
By clicking the Add label button and selecting the ship_name column from the dropdown menu, hovering on any dot will now show the ship’s name.
We can see that one of the ships traveling along the Amazon is named Tasha’s Choice. To explore this ship’s route, we can return to our ship_name column and apply a filter to see only coordinates logged by Tasha’s Choice.
This filter automatically updates our coordinate map, so we can immediately see that Tasha’s Choice also traveled past the mouth of the Amazon and down the coast—likely heading to the major ports there.
Whether you approach this dataset with a specific ship in mind or want to explore a broad region of interest, having a responsive map built into your spreadsheet is essential for orienting yourself with geographic data.
maritime-voyages.tsv
21,649 rows1.89 MB
Open in Rowboat