Review: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits

The Library of Congress holds a collection of hand-drawn infographics about the life and progress of the African-American population. The series was prepared by the sociologist and civil-rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois with a group of his students and alumni for the Paris World Fair in 1900. A stunning new book from Princeton Architectural Press…

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Review: Numbers and Nerves

»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 Minard system

This was a thrilling discovery tour: “Napoleon’s Russian Campaign” (1869) is one of the most famous infographics ever. The man who created it was Charles-Joseph Minard (1781-1870), a little known French civil engineer who immersed himself into the new art of data visualisation when he was already 70 years old. He created a wonderful series of data maps, which was largely unknown to the public until recently. In this book, I have published the full series of maps for the first time, ever

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