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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Leonardo’s Codex Atlanticus
Digital archives are great to have, but hard to experience. This interactive installation lets us look at the daily work of über-artist Leonardo da Vinci, via one of his famous collections of drawings
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Reading Traces
Like many authors, German novelist Theodor Fontane was a voracious reader — and he loved to annotate his books. An interactive installation provides a glimpse into what he was after
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The Middle Ages in Infographics
The Middle Ages are a remote world with a completely different media ecosystem. Books were custom-made, scarce and did take an enormous time to produce. This process left a lot of space for elaborate diagrams
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Infographics: Let’s Make this Personal
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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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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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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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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Review: The Feltron Annual Reports
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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Article: “Ephemeral City” (Süddeutsche Zeitung)
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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Teaching: “Diagrams, Maps, Trees” (Potsdam)
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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Talk: “Bigger! Smarter! Better?” (Köln)
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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