Chapter 1

In the Beginning…

If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development. Aristotle, Metaphysics

Synopsis

This chapter is an overview of the larger questions and themes that provide a context for the book. We consider the relations among numerical data, evidence for an argument and graphs, and then describe some of the pre-history of the visual representation of numbers and the early rise of visualization itself. The story continues to the rise of empirical thinking in philosophy and science around the 16th Century and the concomitant remarkable development of the visual representation of numbers to communicate quantitative phenomena.

Chapter contents

• Introduction
  • The Evolution of Pictures
  • Connecting Data with Pictures
• Seeing the Unexpected
• The Rise of the Graphic Method and Visual Thinking
• A Golden Age

Selected Figures

Figure 1.1: Some of the graphic forms used to represent numbers A clay cuneiform tablet dated as 3300–3100 BCE, giving an account of yields of barley; (b) quipus, a system of knots tied in ropes used by South American Incas, around 1000 CE; (c) symbols used in Mayan culture, around 500 CE, showing the numbers 0–19; (d) a scheme proposed by John W. Tukey (1977) to tally counts of observations by hand, using dots and lines in groups of 10. Wikimedia Commons / GNU Free Documentation License. Source: Sources: (a) Britannica.com; (b) L. Leland Locke, The Ancient Quipu, Washington, DC: The American Museum of Natural History, 1923, fig. 1; (c) Neuromancer2K4 / Bryan Derksen / Wikimedia Commons / GNU Free Documentation License; (d) Pinethicket /

Figure 1.2: Wrestling instructions Successive moments of a wrestling match between two people. From a drawing on the east wall of the tomb of Baqt at the Beni Hasan cemetery (ca. 2000 BCE). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 1.3: Reconstructions of ancient Greek world maps Left: the world according to Anaximander of Miletus; right: a more detailed version due to Hecataeus. Source: Bibi Saint-Paul / Wikimedia.

Figure 1.4: Robert Plot’s History of the Weather The graph records the daily barometric pressure in Oxford for the year 1684. Source: Robert Plot, “Observations of the Wind, Weather, and Height of the Mercury in the Barometer, throughout the Year 1684; Taken in the Musaeum Ashmoleanum at Oxford,” Philosophical Transactions, Vol. 15, 930–943.

Figure 1.5: Huygens’s survival graph Christiaan Huygens’s 1669 curve showing how many people out of a hundred survive between the ages of infancy and eighty-six. The data are taken from John Graunt’s Natural and Political Observations on the Bills of Mortality, 1662. Source: Christiaan Huygens, Oeuvres Complètes, Volume 6. La Haye: M. Nijhoff, 1895.

Figure 1.6: Chart of biography Lifespans of fifty-nine famous people in the six centuries before Christ. Source: Joseph Priestley, A Chart of Biography, London, 1765.

Figure 1.7: Graphical train schedule E. J. Marey’s (1878) graphical train schedule, showing all trains between Paris and Lyon each day. Source: Étienne-Jules Marey, La méthode graphique dans les sciences expérimentales et principalement en physiologie et en médecine. Paris: G. Masson, 1878.

Plate P.1: Lascaux A section of one side of the Chamber of the Bulls from the Lascaux cave. Source: HistoriaGames