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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Historical Infographics: The Stream of Time

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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Historical Infographics: Into the Depth of Time

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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Ranking Mountains and Rivers

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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Historical Infographics: Campaigning with Numbers

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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Review: Image Factories (Otto Neurath and Fritz Kahn)

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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Historical Infographics: The Power of the Tree

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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Historical Infographics: A National Budget, over 81 Years

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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Review: Map. Exploring the World

When I think about cartography, I am always fascinated by the different associations the term evokes in my brain: from map nerd to mathematical superbrain, from school atlas to interactive data visualisation, from “dusty” library map room to high end technology and design studio. It is mind-boggling to see how cartography is undergoing this major…

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Talk: “Mind the Gap” (Helsinki)

For the first time this year, the organisers behind “Visualising Knowledge” conference in Helsinki (most notably the busy and well-connected designers Juuso Koponen and Jonatan Hildén) have put together an academic symposium as a satellite event to the main conference. The panel and audience included visualisation experts and researchers from various Helsinki research institutions and…

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Talk: “Datavisualisation – age-old, brand new” (Helsinki)

As you may have figured, the history of information vis is one of my favourite research topics at the moment, and I am happy to present some of my findings whenever I can. So I gladly took the opportunity to dig deeper into the subject I had only scratched upon in my earlier talk in…

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The Forgotten Maps of Minard

Charles-Joseph Minard is famous for one particular infographic: His map of the so-called “Russian Campaign“ of Napoleon and his army of 420,000 men. It is little known, however, that this graphic was only one of a series of several dozen infographics created by Minard. They all survive in an archive in Paris

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