About This Website

These web pages are meant as a supplement to our book, A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication. The main goals are to:

• reproduce here more color figures than could be accommodated in the print edition. The selected figures are shown as thumbnails, but can be enlarged with a click. R code for the figures we reproduced are also provided as links in the figure captions.
• provide links to related papers and topics that expand on the themes in our book.
• serve as a forum for comments, errata and other topics that could not be fully covered in this first edition.

Who needs this book?

The book is aimed at an educated, lay audience: in general anyone who must either convey or receive quantitative information, which at one time or another includes all of us. This includes, but is not limited to, graphic designers, statisticians, and people in the media. Typical audiences would be readers of the NY Times, The New Yorker, Scientific American, the New Republic, National Review and related publications in other venues.

A more specific market segment is the large community of professionals in the history of science, cartography, data journalism, graphic design, and information visualization, visualization software.

Front cover

The design of the front cover is based on William Playfair’s (1805) marvelous Chart of Universal Commercial History. In it, he asks:

• How and when did civilizations rise and fall from 1500 BCE to 1800 AD?

He shows ancient and modern civilizations in the form of small graphs over time, representing some indication of strength of an empire or civilization, in a way that then can be visually compared to ask further questions:

• Why were some so long-lived?
• When and why did some of them fail?

Another implicit question is:

• How to visualize a history and tell its story?

This chart, like our book, takes a long view of history, with the necessity of some degree of abstraction. These questions also provide a structure for discussing the history of data visualization.

Playfair’s chart uses what at the time was a brilliant and novel graphic form: using compressed little distributions showing the “relative” strength of each civilization over time in a way thay they could be easily compared. The colored bands reflect:

• ancient states (pink)
• modern states (green)
• America (yellow)

This graphic form was recently re-invented and called a “ridgeline” plot because it resembles a set of mountain ridges. This figure appears as Plate 8 in the book and is discussed in Chapter 5, “Charts of History”.

Translations

• A Japanese translation was recently published by Seidosha.

• A Chinese translation is in the works.

Datasets

A unique feature of our book is that we try to appreciate the efforts of key thinkers in the history of data visualization by understanding their data and the graphs they produced. In many cases, we can shed some light on their topics and graphical innovations by trying to reproduce their graphs with modern software.

Toward this end, we created two R packages, used in some of our graphs in the book.

• HistData, a collection of many datasets that are interesting and important in the history of statistics and data visualization. In addition, we use some features from Peter Li’s cholera package for graphs of John Snow’s data on the 1854 cholera outbreak in London.

• Guerry, datasets and maps related to Guerry’s (1833) La Statistique Morale de la France.

R code for figures

This is a list of the R code files for our reconstructions of historical graphs. They are also linked in the figure captions on the individual chapter pages.

• Figure 00_1: Timeline of milestones events, by continent
• Figure 02_3: Graphical inventions
• Figure 03_2: Sex ratio. Arbuthnot’s data on the ratio of male to female births
• Figure 03_7: Reproduction of Guerry’s six maps
• Figure 03_8: Enhanced scatterplot of crimes against persons vs literacy
• Figure 04_10: Line graph of Nightingale’s data
• Figure 04_3: Farr’s elevation - mortality data as a scatterplot
• Figure 04_4: Farr’s Inverse Natural Law of Cholera and Elevation
• Figure 04_6: Cholera deaths by water supply region
• Plate 04_P3a: Snow’s cholera map with pump neighborhoods
• Plate 04_P3b: Snow’s cholera map with pump polygons
• Figure 05_5: Re-creating Playfair’s graph of balance of trade with East Indies
• Figure 06_1: Modern scatterplot
• Figure 06_13: Galton’s visual argument for regression
• Figure 06_15: Galton’s method for finding contours of equal frequency
• Figure 06_18: Hertzsprung-Russel diagrams for stars in the CYG OB1 cluster
• Figure 06_21: Chocolate consumption and Nobel prizes
• Figure 06_22: Wine, IKEA and Nobel prizes
• Figure 06_5: Re-drawn version of Playfair’s graph
• Figure 06_6: Scatterplot version of Playfair’s plot
• Figure 06_9: Reconstruction of Herschel’s graph
• Plate 06_P9: Ridgeline plot showing increasing polarization of politics
• Figure 07_1: Milestones timeline
• Figure 09_13: Plots of successive pairs of RANDU random numbers
• Figure 09_14: RANDU in 3D
• Figure 09_15: Diabetes data from Reaven and Miller

Errata

Here is a list of current errata. If you find other errors in the book, file an issue on GitHub.

Credits

All figures displayed here are authorized for this limited use. In some cases, the figures shown here differ from those printed in the book, but these are credited and available for this use.

In addition, we use a collection of cartoon images for our chapter pages created by RJ Andrews, http://infowetrust.com. We are grateful for permission to use them here.

We thank Matthew Dubins of Donor Science Consulting for his help in making this web site possible.