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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Visualisation is a powerful tool for exploring large sets of digital heritage. Methods of data visualisation can be used to interact…
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Many of our heritage institutations dispose of enormous digital archives and digitized documents. Interactive visualizations can help making these archives accessible, and help users find and work with digitized documents…
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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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There are only very few visualisation techniques that feed into our perception system so well that they actually do facilitate seeing something “at a glance.” Small multiples is certainly one of the methods which has a potential for that. Small multiples can provide…
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»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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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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Nicholas Felton‘s work has been an inspiration to many people in the field of information visualisation, not only when he helped Facebook create their timeline to “unlock people’s personal stories”, but most prominently with his series of Annual Reports which present well-chosen and beautifully designed statistics from Felton’s daily life. With these he has inspired…
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Urban cartography has long been an authoritative matter: companies or authorities invested time, energy and money in researching the data and information to be published in city maps. The wide use of mobile internet is about to change this set-up dramatically. Smartphone users today collect data about how they move through the city, they comment…
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This semester, I have the great pleasure to teach again within the interface design programme of the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam. Teaching is awesome: you get to work with talented and bright young people and you continually learn something—from having to research material for the sessions, from having to think things through in…
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The Rheinische Fachhochschule in Cologne, one of the oldest of its kind in Germany, invited me to talk as part of their series of guest lectures on the theme of “Big Data” last week. As I mentioned earlier, what really keeps me occupied is how we can establish a more detailed and informed dialogue on data visualisation. So…
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