Methods of Visualizing Temporal Data<\/a>, by Nolan Kressin and Joshua MacFadyen.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe movement of commodities has been an important study within Canadian scholarship since Harold Innis wrote The Fur Trade in Canada<\/em> (1930), but many forget that in his earlier thesis on the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) Innis also focused on the goods that these lines carried to market each year. By examining the records of the CPR, Innis painstakingly summarized the freight capacity and the market conditions that shaped this chapter in Canadian environmental history. Innis was well-known as a \u201cdirt\u201d researcher, digging into archival collections and often cutting-and-pasting his notes across manuscripts (literally, with scissors) to organize the enormous amounts of information he collected. As historians turn to more focused studies of individual commodities, we can parse large historical datasets with tools beyond scissors and glue. In this piece we discuss new ways to take some of the same historical railway data and focus on resources like firewood and lumber in their natural environments. In theory, we could even use the railway locations to focus on forest types (softwood) or even species. Perhaps if he had these digital tools, Innis\u2019s first book after the CPR study might have been called the \u201cFir Trade in Canada.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nScholars like Innis might well have imagined a time when computerized systems could assist in the collection and visualization of historical records, but I\u2019m not sure they could have foreseen tools like Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and the ability to create animated maps of railways and the goods they carried between rural and urban environments. In this article, we explain the process we followed to create just such an animated map of a firewood as it was hauled around by not just the CPR, but all railways in Canada. We needed a map that would help shed light on both the geographic <\/em>distribution of biomass energy production and consumption and the temporal <\/em>trends during a period of intensive economic growth (and hence energy expansion). We know that seems like a rather specific research question, but we argue that others could follow a similar process to map the movements of any commodity or passenger traffic on historical railways or any other routes (eg road or water transport) over time.Firewood hauled on eastern Canadian railways, 1876-1903. The symbols represent the cords of wood hauled per meter on individual railways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n