Data Trails: “The Geological Time Spiral” (1975)

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?

Data Trails: “Notes on Matters Affecting the Health” (1858)

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…

Exhibition Review: “Otto Neurath & Fritz Kahn 1920-1945” (Leipzig)

The interwar period in Europe was marked by a whirlwind of contradicting social influences and political turmoil. Revolutionary and socialist …

Data Trails: “The Power of Trees” (1855)

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…

Data Trails: “81 Years of Graphical Excellence” (1874)

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. Today, experts from the field like to joke that data visualisation serves as a gateway drug to statistics…