Source: Florence Nightingale, 1858, from Wikimedia Commons
The act of creating visualizations to convey information can be found from cave drawings to beading, famous maps to contemporary immersive data walls.
Find a sample of examples and analyses of various historical data visualizations below:
W. E. B. du Bois's Data Portraits
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"As visually arresting as it is informative."--The Boston Globe "Du Bois's bold colors and geometric shapes were decades ahead of modernist graphic design in America."--Fast Company's Co.Design W.E.B. Du Bois's Data Portraits is the first complete publication of W.E.B. Du Bois's groundbreaking charts, graphs, and maps presented at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Famed sociologist, writer, and Black rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois fundamentally changed the representation of Black Americans with his exhibition of data visualizations at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Beautiful in design and powerful in content, these data portraits make visible a wide spectrum of African American culture, from advances in education to the lingering effects of slavery. They convey a literal and figurative representation of what he famously referred to as "the color line," collected here in full color for the first time. A landmark collection for social history, graphic design, and data science. * Data display, visualizations, and infographics far ahead of their time * Colorful graphs and charts are mesmerizing pieces of art in their own right * A valuable companion to W.E. B. Du Bois'sThe Souls of Black Folk * Includes contributions from Aldon Morris, Silas Munro, and Mabel O. Wilson W.E.B. Du Bois's Data Portraits is an informative and provocative history, data, and graphic design book that continues to resonate with audiences today.
Knowledge Is Beautiful
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In this sequel to the bestselling book The Visual Miscellaneum, author David McCandless uses stunning and unique visuals to reveal unexpected insights into how the world really works. Every day, every hour, every minute we are bombarded with information, from television, from newspapers, from the Internet, we're steeped in it. We need a way to relate to it. Enter David McCandless and his stunning infographics, simple, elegant ways to interact with information too complex or abstract to grasp any way but visually. McCandless creates visually stunning displays that blend the facts with their connections, contexts, and relationships, making information meaningful, entertaining, and beautiful. And his genius is as much in finding fresh ways to provocatively combine datasets as it is in finding new ways to show the results. Knowledge is Beautiful is a fascinating spin through the world of visualized data, all of it bearing the hallmark of David McCandless's boundary-breaking, signature style. The captivating follow-up to the bestseller The Visual Miscellaneum, Knowledge is Beautiful offers a deeper, more ranging look at the world and its history, with more connectivity between the pages, a greater exploration of causes and consequences, and a more inclusive global outlook. With a portion of its content crowd-sourced from McCandless's international following, Knowledge is Beautiful achieves a revolutionary and democratic look at the key issues from questions on history and politics, the facts of science, streams of literature, and much more. This is a project that will truly push the boundaries of books everywhere, providing insights into our world in a way never seen before.
Dear Data
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Equal parts mail art, data visualization, and affectionate correspondence, Dear Data celebrates "the infinitesimal, incomplete, imperfect, yet exquisitely human details of life," in the words of Maria Popova (Brain Pickings), who introduces this charming and graphically powerful book. For one year, Giorgia Lupi, an Italian living in New York, and Stefanie Posavec, an American in London, mapped the particulars of their daily lives as a series of hand-drawn postcards they exchanged via mail weekly--small portraits as full of emotion as they are data, both mundane and magical.Dear Data reproduces in pinpoint detail the full year's set of cards, front and back, providing a remarkable portrait of two artists connected by their attention to the details of their lives--including complaints, distractions, phone addictions, physical contact, and desires. These details illuminate the lives of two remarkable young women and also inspire us to map our own lives, including specific suggestions on what data to draw and how. A captivating and unique book for designers, artists,correspondents, friends, and lovers everywhere.
With the advance of software to create data visualizations, many products have communities that share their visualizations and code. This includes include:
Some databases have the functionality to filter for articles with a certain image type, such as a chart, diagram, map, figure, etc.
These databases include:
Source: Giorgia Lupi and Kaki King — Bruises: The Data We Don’t See, 2018. From http://giorgialupi.com/bruises-the-data-we-dont-see
In addition to historical data visualizations, which by default were drawn by hand, there is a resurgence in hand-drawn and illustrated data visualizations to bring a human touch and unique design. Some data visualizers known for these types of data visualizations include:
