Formed in
2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue
archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of
history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and
has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
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Head/Tail
Breaks
Head/tail breaks is a new classification system for heavy
tailed data. It is based on the fact that in nature there are far more
smaller thing than bigger things. The smaller things are in the tail,
the bigger things are in the head (Jiang, 2013). The head/tail breaks
method is not just a new classification method, it is also a new way
of thinking.
Alternative classification systems are in most cases based on
gaussian thinking, while the head tail breaks is more focused on the
fractal thinking. In fractal thinking the deeper structure of things
is an essential element. If we for example look at our own body, there is
a deep scaling structure. For example every molecule has many
different atoms, every atom has many protons and electrons, and so on.
This so-called scaling structure can be sensed as
beautiful (Jiang & Sui, 2014). If we apply this method to
maps, the maps become more beautiful, because they are based on the
deeper scaling structure: much more smaller things than bigger things. In
this lab we compared the natural breaks method with the head/tail breaks
method, in four different map types: dot maps, polyline maps, choropleths
and DEMs (figure 11). You can look at these image and decide yourself which
are more beautiful, left or right.
 
Figure 11. Natural breaks
(left) vs. Head/tail breaks (right)
Jiang, B., & Sui, D. Z. (2014). A new
kind of beauty out of the underlying scaling of geographic
space. The Professional
Geographer, 66(4),
676-686.
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