With Digital Maps, Historians Chart a New Way Into the Past

By JEFFREY R. YOUNG

A push to make historical data more visual could yield a better understanding of events

Historians are great at telling stories, but they're lousy at pictures, asserts Edward L. Ayers, a history professor and dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Virginia.

While other disciplines have found ways to represent complex phenomena using illustrations that overlay many types of information, Mr. Ayers says, history has for the most part