In the age of digital distribution, when news travels ever further and faster and media outlets compete for a fleeting…
Book: “The Minard System” (Princeton Architectural Press, 2018)
Charles-Joseph Minard was the engineer behind THE most famous historical infographic: The flow map tracing the loss in soldiers during…
Book Chapter: “Beauty in Code” (2020, CentreCentre)
I am very happy to announce the coming release of the book “Print Punch. Artefacts From The Punch Card Era” by…
Book Review: Numbers and Nerves (Oregon State UP)
»We know from the start that we are creatures of compassion and feeling, but also animals of analysis and measurement.…
Interactive: Reading Traces (Urban Complexity Lab)
Visualisation is a powerful tool for exploring large sets of digital heritage. Methods of data visualisation can be used to interact…
Preview: The Middle Ages in Infographics (June 2019)
With the advance of digitalization, the many Middle Age manuscripts preserved in our libraries and archives have now become increasingly available to the public. The intellectual and aesthetic wealth that they offer is staggering, and they contain loads of elaborate diagrams…
History: Raise the Bar (1770s)
The bar chart is THE most widely used… Ok, I don’t need to explain just how important and ubiquitous the…
Preview: The History of Infographics, as seen by the experts (June 2019)
I am especially happy and honoured that four experts on the history of information graphics have contributed to my upcoming book: David Rumsey, Michael Friendly, Michael Stoll, and Scott Klein. This post is a preview of their individual chapters…
Interactive: Leonardo’s Codex Atlanticus (The Visual Agency)
Visualisation is a powerful tool for exploring large sets of digital heritage. Methods of data visualisation can be used to interact…
Preview: The Early Modern Age in Infographics (June 2019)
With the early modern age in Europe began a long-term process of intellectual development that brought with it an increasing appreciation of individual expertise as compared to the authority of traditional knowledge. Intellectual culture began to be shaped more and more by thinkers and artists who were devoted to the “study of reality”…
Preview: The 19th Century in Infographics (June 2019)
In the 19th century there was tremendous growth in the use of information graphics, such that by the end of the century a natural proliferation of maps and diagrams can be noted across many areas of media culture…
Input: What is a Dashboard?
I have great admiration for research projects that set out to investigate seemingly obvious things, and then suddenly a whole ocean of questions…
Preview: The 20th Century in Infographics (June 2019)
My new book with art & design publisher TASCHEN looks at the incredibly rich history of infographics and data visualisation, tracing…
Summary: Digital Arts Lab (Berlin)
What is happening in Berlin’s creative technology scene these days? The pop-up exhibition “Digital Arts Lab” showcased a selection of works…
Book Review: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits (Princeton Arch. Press)
The Library of Congress holds a collection of hand-drawn infographics about the life and progress of the African-American population. The…
Summary I: Malofiej 27 summit (Pamplona)
Malofiej is one of the most interesting gatherings in the world of infographics (and some data visualization). Here is a brief…
Summary II: Malofiej 27 summit (Pamplona)
This is part two of my brief summary of the Malofiej #27 conference (March 27th to March 29th, 2019) in…
Fun: Get your own Minard
Dear visualisation enthusiasts, it’s MINARD DAY! Charles-Joseph was born on March 27, 238 years ago today. To celebrate his birthday,…
Input: Visualising Personality
There are only very few visualisation techniques that feed into our perception system so well that they actually do facilitate seeing something “at a glance.” Small multiples is certainly one of the methods which has a potential for that. Small multiples can provide…
History: From Paris with Love (ca. 1845)
The graphic train schedule based on a line grid (often falsely attributed to Étienne-Jules Marey) is an influential early visualization…
Input: Data journalism for the people
One of the fields that is literally turned upside down these days is journalism. Newspapers and magazines have a history of many decades, their first ancestors appeared in early modern times. Now, digital publishing allows for completely new approaches to reporting.
History: “The Stream of Time” (1804)
Timelines seem like such a „natural idea“ these days that we don’t even notice their ubiquity anymore: Facebook timeline, news feeds, graphic interfaces for back-up versions – how did anyone manage their life before there were things like this? Timelines are a universal concept…
History: “The Tree of Virtuous Behavior” (1608)
I stumbled upon this severe beauty of a tree diagram in the Beinecke digital collections and was immediately thrilled about this hidden gem from 1608. Then I never came around to really studying it — until just now…
History: “The Geological Time Spiral” (1975)
The Earth is roughly four and a half billion years old. During most of that time—i.e. over the course of some four billion years—the geological and biological development on our planet happened unbelievably slow. How can we possibly form even a faint idea of this unimaginable process that is the history of the Earth?
History: “The Comparative Machine” (1836)
There is a very basic joy in roaming through atlases and in looking at maps. Atlases are rich collections of places, and if there is one thing they can do it is making you travel around the world, to places near and far…
History: “Notes on Matters Affecting the Health” (1858)
Visualising data on health and mortality has a most up-to-date ring to it, as if it had required the rise of big data and computational tools for something as intricate as visual health statistics to develop. Surprisingly, however, already the mid-19th century saw a huge upsurge…
Review: “Otto Neurath & Fritz Kahn 1920-1945” (Leipzig)
The interwar period in Europe was marked by a whirlwind of contradicting social influences and political turmoil. Revolutionary and socialist…
History: “The Power of Trees” (1855)
This beauty of a diagram is considered to be the first organisational chart ever. The inception of the railways in the mid-19th century must have been a mind-blowing change process…
History: “81 Years of Graphical Excellence” (1874)
81 years of budget data and various categories in three diagrams – the United States Fiscal Chart from the 1870 US census atlas is a real blockbuster in the history of data visualisation. Today, experts from the field like to joke that data visualisation serves as a gateway drug to statistics…
Book Review: “Mapping Time” (Esri Press)
There’s hardly any infographic that is more famous, more often cited and more often re-designed than the graphic on Napoleon’s march…