The Critic's Secret Weapon

Ambition. Vision. Obediance. Which provinces had them? Which didn't?

Catherine II knew what she wanted from her towns. She wanted to look out from St. Petersburg at a constellation of hubs of enlightenment and rationality. She wanted order and uniformity. She (like her successors, Alexander I and Nicholas I) wanted the provincial and district towns to model and project imperial authority.

Did they?

One way to answer that question is to lump together the features of all the towns of a given province and visualize the results. Start by scrolling through the list of provinces and paying attention to the distribution of feature categories. Do the band widths change? Are all of the categories represented? Then, select a province that interests you. When you click on the name, the bubble map and bar chart will respond. 

Or, use the bubble map as a filter. Hover to see the labels. When you click on a bubble, the horizontal bar chart will respond, showing you how many [blacksmith shops] appear on the plans for each province.

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