One of the most famous maps in the Leventhal Center’s collections, this whale chart was created by Lt. Matthew Fontaine Maury in 1851 to show the distribution of different whale species and the best seasons for hunting them. Though more than 130 years apart, both this map and Resources on Georges Bank and Nantucket Shoals rely on the convention of a systematic grid and a combination of color and pictorial symbols to create a simple way of encoding geographic observations.
Eventually, subdividing geographic areas into zones on a continuous grid developed from a cartographic convention into a technical one. Today, continuous grids are commonly used for encoding geospatial information as raster data. In raster data, geographic information is stored as an array of regularly sized pixels, each containing measurements of some values (for example, number of whales). Raster data is described in greater detail in the section on Pixelating Places".