History is abstract. Urban space is not. Here’s an installation that made the history of infographics tangible, in the truest sense of the word. A collaboration with the Graphic Design festival Breda and Dutch illustrator Jan Hamstra
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Diagrams: Raise the bar
Bar charts are everywhere today. Back around 1800, they came as a complicated visual that required abstract thinking. Was it the recording of flood levels that inspired them?
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Collectors of Historical Infographics
Researching the history of information graphics is a collective effort. I have been lucky to collaborate with some of the most prominent collectors and enablers in the field
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Infographics in the Early Modern Age
The early modern age in Europe was shaped by the advent of printing technologies — as well as by the colonization of large parts of the world. The infographics from the period provide testimony
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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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The Minard System
“Napoleon’s Russian Campaign” is one of the most famous historical infographics ever. This is a compendium about the life and work of Charles-Joseph Minard (1781-1870), the French civil engineer who created the masterpiece. It was the last in a long series of works. He was trained in technical drawing and cartography as well as in mathematics. After his retirement, he immersed himself in the new art of statistics and data visualisation – creating an outstanding series of statistical maps
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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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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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Historical Infographics: Campaigning with Numbers
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…
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