New Book: “The Minard System” (Fall 2018)

This is a catalog of all statistical visualizations by Charles-Joseph Minard (1781-1870), who is considered one of the most important…

Data Trails: “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…

New Post: 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.

Data Trails: “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…

Data Trails: “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…

Data Trails: “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?

Data Trails: “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…

Data Trails: “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…

Exhibition 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…

Data Trails: “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…

Data Trails: “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…

Book Review: “Dear Data” (Penguin)

To craft something requires skills, mastery and patience. It means to create something step by step, with a passion for…

Workshop: “The Future(s) of the Atlas” (Leipzig)

My work throughout the past years has involved researching current trends as well as the long history of information visualisation. This research focus…

Article: “Nervous Systems” (Süddeutsche Zeitung)

If you need brain food, some irritation and some art for inspiration – the House of World Cultures in Berlin…

Article: “The Feltron Annual Reports” (Süddeutsche Zeitung)

Nicholas Felton‘s work has been an inspiration to many people in the field of information visualisation, not only when he…

Article: “Ephemeral City” (Süddeutsche Zeitung)

Urban cartography has long been an authoritative matter: companies or authorities invested time, energy and money in researching the data…

Jury Member: “Information is Beautiful Awards” (London)

I felt honoured to be part of the jury of this year’s “Kantar Information Is Beautiful Awards”. The awards’ winners…

Teaching: “Diagrams, Maps, Trees” (Potsdam)

This semester, I have the great pleasure to teach again within the interface design programme of the University of Applied…

Book Review: “Map. Exploring the World” (Phaidon)

When I think about cartography, I am always fascinated by the different associations the term evokes in my brain: from…

Talk: “Mind the Gap” (Helsinki)

For the first time this year, the organisers behind “Visualising Knowledge” conference in Helsinki (most notably the busy and well-connected…

Talk: “Datavisualisation – age-old, brand new” (Helsinki)

As you may have figured, the history of information vis is one of my favourite research topics at the moment,…

Article: “Digital Archives” (Süddeutsche Zeitung)

Almost 44 million objects. That’s how many digitised objects are available through the grand European digital library Europeana today. The…

Talk: “Bigger! Smarter! Better?” (Köln)

The Rheinische Fachhochschule in Cologne, one of the oldest of its kind in Germany, invited me to talk as part of…

Talk & Article: “The Fifty Maps of Minard” (Pamplona)

I have had the great opportunity last week to present at this year’s Malofiej conference one of my currently favorite…

Book: “Understanding the World – The Atlas of Infographics”

Yes, I am quite excited to announce the release of my second collaboration with TASCHEN publishing, “Understanding the World. The…

Exhibition: “Micropia” (Amsterdam)

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.