In collaboration with Graphic Matters Festival we created an Infographics Time Walk in Breda (NL). It introduces the most interesting historical infographics, using wonderful illustrations by Dutch designer Jan Hamstra…
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Historical Infographics: Raise the Bar
In today’s world of visualization, the bar chart is one of the most widely used statistical diagrams. William Playfair, an ingenious rogue Scotsman, is often credited with having invented this type of diagram around 1786. But was he really the first to work with this method? Where did he draw his inspiration from? William…
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The Middle Ages in Infographics
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…
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Collectors of Historical Infographics
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…
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Infographics in the Early Modern Age
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…
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The 19th Century in Infographics
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…
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Historical Infographics: From Paris with Love
The graphic train schedule based on a line grid (often falsely attributed to Étienne-Jules Marey) is an influential early visualization method for railway traffic. Here is everything you need to know about it. Ligne de Paris à Boulogne, 1852. Courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France. Where do I know this from? Of course you’ve seen this…
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20th Century Infographics
From the start of the 20th century the popularization of information graphics continued just as had been observed in the century previous. New contexts and uses for info graphics included illustrated magazines, popular science books…
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Book: The Minard System
Charles-Joseph Minard was the engineer behind THE most famous historical infographic: The flow map tracing the loss in soldiers during Napoleon’s Russian campaign in 1812/13. Drawn and printed in 1869, the map was only the last of Minard’s sixty large format statistical maps. For the first time, my book presents all data maps by Minard’s…
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Historical Infographics: The Stream of Time
Timelines seem like such a „natural idea“ these days that we don’t even notice their ubiquity anymore. Timelines are a universal concept…
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Historical Infographics: Into the Depth of Time
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?
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Historical Infographics: Ranking Mountains
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…
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