I am an author and editor based in Berlin. My themes are data visualisation and interactive media.
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…
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…
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?
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…
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…
The interwar period in Europe was marked by a whirlwind of contradicting social influences and political turmoil. Revolutionary and socialist…
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…
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…
There’s hardly any infographic that is more famous, more often cited and more often re-designed than the graphic on Napoleon’s march…
To craft something requires skills, mastery and patience. It means to create something step by step, with a passion for…
My work throughout the past years has involved researching current trends as well as the long history of information visualisation. This research focus…
If you need brain food, some irritation and some art for inspiration – the House of World Cultures in Berlin…
Nicholas Felton‘s work has been an inspiration to many people in the field of information visualisation, not only when he…
Urban cartography has long been an authoritative matter: companies or authorities invested time, energy and money in researching the data…
I felt honoured to be part of the jury of this year’s “Kantar Information Is Beautiful Awards”. The awards’ winners…
This semester, I have the great pleasure to teach again within the interface design programme of the University of Applied…
When I think about cartography, I am always fascinated by the different associations the term evokes in my brain: from…
For the first time this year, the organisers behind “Visualising Knowledge” conference in Helsinki (most notably the busy and well-connected…
As you may have figured, the history of information vis is one of my favourite research topics at the moment,…
Almost 44 million objects. That’s how many digitised objects are available through the grand European digital library Europeana today. The…
The Rheinische Fachhochschule in Cologne, one of the oldest of its kind in Germany, invited me to talk as part of…
I have had the great opportunity last week to present at this year’s Malofiej conference one of my currently favorite…
Yes, I am quite excited to announce the release of my second collaboration with TASCHEN publishing, “Understanding the World. The…
Together with Berlin-based ART+COM studios, we had the great opportunity to create several media installations for an exhibition which I thought had a genial concept: MICROPIA. Conceived as a permanent show within the zoo in Amsterdam, it presents knowledge about animals whom we share our lives with but never see – microbes.
For a few years now, Canadian-born Jer Thorp has been working on the forefront of data visualisation, creating ever new…
Moritz Stefaner came to the field of data visualisation with a background in cognitive science and interface design. His works…
In the ever growing field of information visualisation, there are a few historical heroes and pioneers who are always referred…
I am very much into all things related to structuring information & visual storytelling. So it is exciting to hear…
Maps are a means to store and communicate location-based data – from physical landscape information to climate data, from popular…
Even though tools like “Processing” have been out there for a while, computational design is still a rather new strand…
