The visual representation of a network shows us far more than where nodes are or what types of network links connect them. A network map tells us the information its authors thought was important, and in doing so tells us what message they wished to convey, the level of technical detail they wished to share, and their ability to express this. We have collected a large set of publicly available network maps from a range of operators, countries, and times, and manually transcribed them into a portable data format. The result is a large store of network topology data and associated metadata. In this article we discuss some of the lessons learned both in collecting this data, and in what it can teach us about the priorities of network map makers.
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