Learning more

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This section contains some links and references to further reading and topics that you might wish to explore. They didn’t fit directly in the narrative of a given chapter, but are useful nonetheless.

This web version contains additional items and references not printed in the book.

Chapter 1

• The history of cartography has many sources, but among these, the project of the same name at the University of Wisconsin (https://geography.wisc.edu/histcart/) is notable. There are now six volumes, some published online and in print form by the University of Chicago press (https://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/HOC/index.html)

Chapter 2

• This chapter draws on material from Michael Friendly, Valero-Mora, and Ulargui (2010). The supplementary web page for this paper, https://datavis.ca/gallery/langren/, gives the historical sources, including earlier versions of Figure 2.1 contained in various letters, translations of La Verdadera and the text of Van Langren’s cipher.

• Van Langren’s cipher (Figure 2.5) is still one of the most elusive unsolved problems in cryptography. If you like the history of this topic, you might enjoy the book by Craig Bauer, Unsolved!: … (Bauer 2017).

• A popular history of the problem of longitude by Dava Sobel (1996), focuses on the work of the clockmaker John Harrison who, only with considerable difficulty, was finally perceived to have solved the problem to sufficient accuracy to be awarded a prize by the Longitude Commission.

• The story of the mapping and naming of lunar features did not begin or end with van Langren. Ewen Whitaker’s Mapping and Naming the Moon … (2003) gives a comprehensive history and devotes a chapter to van Langren, including other versions of the 1645 lunar map.

• In the period after van Langren, other early things that could be called graphs were often produced by devices that recorded some phenomenon like temperature or barometric pressure by a pen on moving paper or a drum. Robert Plot’s chart of barometric pressure (Figure 1.4) is one example. Hoff and Geddes (1962) give a detailed history of this early history with many fine illustrations.

Chapter 3

• The wider story of the roles of empirical observation and data in the intellectual development of science in the and is well told by Ian Hacking in The Taming of Chance (1990).

• The story of Guerry’s Moral Statistics of France is told in greater detail in Michael Friendly (2007). This article also describes his later work and relates his data and questions to modern methods of statistics and graphics. A web supplement, https://datavis.ca/gallery/guerry, provides resource material, and Guerry’s data have been made available in the R package Guerry, https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=Guerry.

• Very little of Guerry’s personal life or family history was known until recently. A brief biography is available (in French) in Michael Friendly (2008b) and an English version linked on the datavis.ca web site mentioned above.

• Along the way, Guerry tabulated so much data that he invented a mechanical calculator, an ordonnateur statistique, to help in this work. The history of this device, perhaps the first special-purpose statistical calculator is described in Michael Friendly and Saint Agathe (2012).

• In England, Joseph Fletcher comes closest to Guerry in his pursuit of the relations among moral variables and his use of thematic maps to display such data. R. Cook and Wainer (2012) describe these contributions.

• The most comprehensive treatment of the early development of thematic mapping is still Robinson (1982). Palsky (1996) gives a detailed history of quantitative cartography in the 19th century (in French), and Michael Friendly and Palsky (2007) provide a history of thematic maps and diagrams designed to explore the connections between graphic images and scientific questioning. Delaney (2012) provides a richly illustrated overview of some landmark developments in this area.

Chapter 4

• Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map … (Johnson 2006) is a compelling popular description of the background for the cholera outbreaks in London and the roles that Snow and others played in uncovering evidence and tracing the initial outbreak to the “index case,” Frances Lewis, a five-month-old child residing at 40 Broad Street, adjacent to the pump.

• Disease Maps … by Tom Koch (2011) traces a history of the medical uses of cartography to understand the outbreak and transmission of disease.

• Scott Klein, a data journalist at ProPublica, presents an interesting look at how journalists at the New York Tribune covered an outbreak of cholera in New York City in September, 1849, using a time-series line graph of cholera deaths on its front page. See: https://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/infographics-in-the-time-of-cholera.

• A project initiated by Lynn McDonald, The Collected Works of Florence Nightingale, comprises all her available surviving writing (letters, articles, pamphlets, etc.) in 16 volumes. An online catalog is available at https://www.uoguelph.ca/~cwfn/index.htm.

• Worldmapper, https://www.worldmapper.org/, is a project developed by Danny Dorling and others, largely at the University of Sheffield in the U.K. It now has nearly 700 maps in 30 general categories covering food, goods, income, poverty, housing, education, disease, violence, causes of death, and so forth. Their slogan is “mapping your world as you’ve never seen it before.” It is well worth a visit, if not a journey.

Chapter 5

• Unlike most other classics in the history of data visualization, Playfair’s main works—–the Atlas and the Statistical Breviary—– are available in a modern reprinting, edited and introduced by Howard Wainer and Ian Spence and published in 2005 by Cambridge University Press. A modern reader may be interested reading Playfair’s words to see how he faced the challenge of describing his novel charts to his audience around 1800. Equally well, one might be impressed with the quality of the reprinting and the presentation of Playfair’s plates, a number of which are on fold-out pages.

• The collection of research papers and biographical studies of Playfair by Ian Spence can be found at https://psych.utoronto.ca/users/spence/Research_WP.html

Chapter 6

• Parts of the chapter are based on material presented in Michael Friendly and Denis (2005).

• The remarkable capabilities of the ellipse and higher dimensional cousins (ellipsoids) are described in Michael Friendly, Monette, and Fox (2013). Slides from a related talk can be found at https://datavis.ca/papers/EllipticalInsights-2x2.pdf.

• You can find more examples of spurious correlations on the web page of Tyler Vigan, https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations, and his accompanying book. Most of these result from plotting two different time series, using different scales for each on the \(y\)-axis, now usually considered a graphical sin, if not a high crime or misdemeanor.

• Galton’s classic data on the heights of parents and their offspring, shown in Figures 6.14 - 6.16 were not quite as linear as most people believe. Wachsmuth, Wilkinson, and Dallal (2003) re-analyze this data and find a slightly non-linear relation, explained by Galton’s method of pooling mothers’ and fathers’ heights.

Chapter 7

• This chapter draws heavily on Michael Friendly (2008a), “The Golden Age of Statistical Graphics”. That paper contains many more figures and greater depth on some of the topics discussed here.

• Michael Friendly (2002) provides a review of Minard’s graphical works. A complete bibliography with many images can be found at https://datavis.ca/gallery/minbib.html. Most recently, Rendgen (2018), The Minard System, provides beautiful reproductions of all of Minard’s statistical graphics, some not well-known before.

• Raymond Andrews has taken this further, with a visual catalog of Minard’s works, with thumbnails, a timeline and classification by content topic. See this at: https://infowetrust.com/seeking-minard/

• Some years ago, one of the authors issued a challenge for modern software designers to take Minard’s data and either reproduce his graph of the fate of Napoleon’s Grand Army, or take this graphic story further. A number of these are collected at https://www.datavis.ca/gallery/re-minard.php. There is a recent addition, an interactive chart by Norbert Landsteiner, https://www.masswerk.at/minard/, one of the nicest interactive reproductions we have seen.

• Many of the developments in data-based graphics in this period stemmed from thematic cartography, the use of maps to present quantitative information in a geographical framework. The most complete discussion of the rise of graphical methods in this context in France in the remains Gilles Palsky’s (1996) book, Des Chiffres et de Cartes … . Michael Friendly and Palsky (2007) give a more extensive overview of the development of the use of maps and statistical diagrams to visualize nature and society.

• Due to limitations of space, we treat the period from ~ 1900 – 1950 only in a few pages at the end of this chapter. In part this reflects the fact that there were few innovations in graphic methods and techniques during this period (M. Friendly 2007).

• One topic that is novel is the Isotype system of pictorial graphics introduced in Vienna by Otto and Marie Neurath between 1925 – 1935. Isotype, the International System of Typographic Picture Education, was designed to represent social and economic facts pictorially, thus making numbers visually appealing and memorable. Jason Forrest tells me that Burke, Kindel, and Walker (2013) Isotype: design and contexts 1925-1971 is the definitive book on the topic. Another good source of information on Neurath’s methods of pictorial statistics is the collection at the University of Reading: Typography & Graphic Communication: Otto and Marie Neurath Isotype Collection.

Chapter 8

• The most comprehensive source on the development of thematic cartography is Arthur Robinson’s Early Thematic Mapping in the History of Cartography (1982).

• Some historical connections among scientific discovery, visual explanation and thematic maps and statistical diagrams are described in Michael Friendly and Palsky (2007).

• The modern text by Slocum et al. (2008) covers thematic cartography and geographic visualization.

• Three-dimensional surfaces have long been studied as mathematical objects, described by equations, or \((x, y, z)\) data and capable of being rendered realistically with lighting and shadows. See https://www.scratchapixel.com/lessons/3d-basic-rendering/rendering-3d-scene-overview for a readable introduction to this topic.

Chapter 9

• Maria Braun’s Picturing Time (1992) is the most comprehensive treatment of the work of E.-J. Marey. It contains over 300 images of his mechanical devices, chronophotographs and cinematic work.

• The Graphics Video Library of the Statistical Graphics Section of the American Statistical Association, https://stat-graphics.org/movies/ captures much of the history of dynamic graphics for data analysis over the past 50 years. it includes Kruskal’s MDS video, Tukey’s PRIM-9 video, and many more that illustrate and explain some of the important early developments in modern data visualization methods.

• Friedman and Stuetzle (2002) give an historical appreciation of John W. Tukey’s work in the development of PRIM-9 and interactive graphics. D. Cook and Swayne (2007) provide some modern examples of interactive and dynamic graphics, using R and GGobi software.

• The collection of Hans Rosling’s video presentations may be found at https://www.gapminder.org/videos-2/. One of the first, introducing the moving bubble chart, was a TED talk titled “The best stats you’ve ever seen,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w. These are well worth watching.

• Our coverage of modern software for data visualization was necessarily limited to early developments. Perhaps the most influential recent development is The Grammar of Graphics by Lee Wilkinson (1999), a general theory of the syntax and semantics of data graphs and charts. Various implementations of these ideas for different programming languages abound, but the most widely-known is ggplot2 for R by Hadley Wickham (2016)

Chapter 10

• Minard’s graphic of the 1812 campaign has inspired many to try to extend the graphic portrayal of this history. A collection of some of these and further background can be seen at https://www.datavis.ca/gallery/re-minard.php.

• Recently, an impressive interactive map and historical narrative of the Russian campaign with many illustrations was developed by the Russian News Agency TASS, https://1812.tass.ru/ and was shortlisted for the Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards.

• The entire collection of the graphic works of C. J. Minard is now available in a lovely volume curated by Sandra Rendgen (2018), The Minard System.

• A discussion of W. E. B. Du Bois’ charts at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle and a wider selection of these can be found at https://hyperallergic.com/306559/w-e-b-du-boiss-modernist-data-visualizations-of-black-life/.

• A nearly complete collection of W. E. B. Du Bois’ charts has been recreated using modern software by Anthony J. Starks. See https://speakerdeck.com/ajstarks/recreating-the-dubois-data-portraits for an impressive slide show. The data and code is available on Github: ajstarks/dubois-data-portraits

• The drafting of Plates 17 and 19 required more than standard graphics software. To learn the full story behind the development of these figures, see https://infowetrust.com/picturing-the-great-migration/.

• A related article is Andrews, RJ & Wainer, H. (2017). The Great Migration: A Graphics Novel Featuring the Contributions of W. E. B. Du Bois and C. J. Minard, Significance, 14(3), 14–19.

References