»We know from the start that we are creatures of compassion and feeling, but also animals of analysis and measurement. Which way of seeing and expressing the world actually achieves our desires, meets our needs, and satisfies our lives to a greater extent?« Statistical analysis provides a very specific way of understanding large scale phenomena. Statistics…
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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The interwar period in Europe was marked by a whirlwind of contradicting social influences and political turmoil. Revolutionary and socialist policies faced early fascist raids, modern mass media were published with unprecedented speed, and the general atmosphere of complexity was accompanied by a delusory enthusiasm for new technologies. It was in this social context that…
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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…
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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…
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To craft something requires skills, mastery and patience. It means to create something step by step, with a passion for details and execution. Crafted products are en vogue these days, and in a world where industrial and digital creation processes are the norm, hand-crafted things appeal to us as rare and precious gems. Such are…
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