It is mildly embarrassing to come across a great resource that is hosted within one’s own institution by accident (read: google). Unwittingly googling one’s own publications is definitively worse, but that is not the point. Nonetheless, I was happy to stumble upon the Institute of European History’s digital map server when I needed to illustrate my point about territorial cleavages in Germany. The site has a slightly dusty look and uses gifs for previews, but the licence is more than generous and the coverage and quality are impressive. If you ever need a map of Hessen-Kassel’s administrative structures in 1821, look no further. The only thing that is missing (as far as I can tell) are shapefiles, but if you are serious about GIS applications, you can convert/georeference the postscript files. For lecture slides, the gifs should suffice anyway.
Creating Matrix-Like Plots in Stata
I could find no canned command that produces what I wanted: a table-like arrangement, with labels for the columns (i.e. sample sizes) and rows (experimental conditions). What I could do was set up / label a variable with 18 categories (one for each data set) and use the ,by() option to create a trellis plot. But that would waste a lot of ink/space by replicating redundant information. At the end of the day, I created a nine graphs that were completely empty save for the text that I wanted as row/column labels, which I then combined into two separate figures, that were then combined (using a distorted aspect ratio) with my 18 separate plots. That boils down to a lot of dumb code.