• Do you believe that we gain a better understanding of the world by looking at statistical graphics? 
• Have you seen Minard’s diagram of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia?
• Do you know what the designer was trying to communicate?

Why you have seen Minard’s diagram of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia

When Charles Joseph Minard died in 1870, his diagram of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia had not appeared in any publication.

Its first appearance in book form was in 1878. It was redrawn and reproduced in black and white as Figure 37 in La méthode graphique by Etienne-Jules Marey. That book pushed the radical idea that the future of experimental science was the use of graphics rather than tables of numbers. Marey made his case with representations of quantities, time, and other variables from drawings taken from the distant and recent past. He introduced Minard’s diagram as a “graphic representation of an itinerary route”. He pointed out that it included the variables of quantity, geography, time, and temperature. He also noted that the diagram shows Hannibal’s invasion of Italy. His description ended with language that was to be paraphrased over many decades:

Always a striking effect, but nowhere does the graphic representation of the march of the armies reach that degree of brutal eloquence which, in figure 37, seems to defy the historian’s pen.

The first English translation of the book, Etienne-Jules Marey, The Graphic Method, was published in 2022 by RJ Andrews’ Visionary Press. Marey’s book was cutting edge science in 1878, but it was quickly overshadowed by his own pioneering experiments with photography. Marey is remembered today not for starting the history of data visualization but because he went on to invent and apply a series of photographic innovations to document human and animal motion, brilliantly chronicled in Picturing Time by Marta Braun (1992).

But I am getting ahead of the story. There is no evidence that this first reprint of Minard’s diagram made it famous. The diagram languished in obscurity for more than fifty years until 1937 when H. Gray Funkhouser, an American mathematician and historian, reproduced the graphic in “Historical Development of the Graphical Representation of Statistical Data”. This book-length essay in the history of science journal Osiris introduced Minard to the English academic record. Funkhouser translated and paraphrased Marey’s statement that the graphic “seems to defy the pen of the historian by its brutal eloquence”, and cites Minard’s own essay “Graphic Tables and Figurative Maps” (1862) to emphasize the impact of the work. Funkhouser wrote:

Minard says that the dominating principle which had characterized his graphic tables and figurative maps was the immediate appreciation by the eyes of the proportions of the numerical results. He also speaks of the cordial reception given to his work by the Emperor Napoleon III. 

Looking closely at the sentence in Minard’s essay where he claims the Emperor viewed his graphics, there is a footnote.

Very recently the cotton import map having been placed under the eyes of the Emperor, “His Majesty examined it with keen interest, expressing the intention of consulting it if necessary.”

Apparently it was one of Minard’s “European Cotton Import” graphics that passed before the Emperor’s eyes. That series, reproduced in Sandra Rengen’s The Minard System, visualized how England and France replaced American raw cotton imports during the American Civil War by turning to sources in Egypt and India. The appearance of that book in 2018 was the first complete collection of Minard’s diagrams in book form. The French translation of Rendgen’s book, Le Système Minard, is the only complete collection of Minard’s diagrams to be published in France.

Whether the Emperor saw lines representing cotton or invading armies, Funkhauser was talking about the same designer. Thirty years later, the American geographer and cartographer Arthur H. Robinson restated the same quotation. “The Thematic Maps of Charles Joseph Minard” was published in the cartography journal, Imago Mundi, in 1967. He wrote:

The last thematic maps made by Minard deserve special mention here. In a pair of maps published in 1869 he showed, by the flow technique, the reductions in the sizes of the armies of Hannibal in his campaign into Italy and of Napoleon in the Russian campaign of 1812–1813. Especially striking is the map dealing with the Russian campaign, since the loss of life was so catastrophic in that futile exercise in military aggrandisement. The reduction of an army of 422,000 to only 10,000 is portrayed in startling fashion by the steadily diminishing line. This map apparently became very well known and, as Marey put it, seemed to defy the pen of the historian by its brutal eloquence.

Still, it wasn’t this essay in an academic cartography journal that brought the diagram of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia to the attention of a large public. 

That happened when Edward Tufte, a professor of Political Science, Statistics, and Computer Science, reproduced a color version of half the diagram in The Visualization of Quantitative Information. Tufte’s book first appeared in 1983 and grew in popularity as he wrote and published more books on the subject of data visualization. He introduced the diagram as “the classic of Charles Joseph Minard (1781–1870), the French engineer, which shows the terrible fate of Napoleon’s army in Russia.” Tufte writes a long and detailed description of the diagram, beginning with Robinson’s version of Marey’s brutal eloquence quotation. On the opposite page he reproduces “Minard’s French original, which was printed as a two-color lithograph in the form of a small poster” above a second reproduction with the text translated into English. To which he added:

It may well be the best statistical graphic ever drawn.

Bingo. In 21st century language, the diagram became The Greatest.

Tufte was the author, the promoter, the judge, and the publisher in this case. In combination with his books and public lectures, he prints and sells a version of the graphic as a poster. This combination has made it one of the best known information graphics in the world today. 

What the designer was trying to communicate

Let’s start with the original diagram.

The lithograph, dated November 20, 1869, contains two diagrams, one above the other, printed on a single sheet. On the top is Figurative map of the successive losses of Hannibal’s army during the march from Spain to Italy through Gallia (according to Polybius). Hannibal, for those not familiar with Ancient History, was a Carthaginian military leader who led an army across two major European mountain ranges, from Spain to Italy, in 218 B.C. The diagram illustrates how the distance travelled and mountains and rivers crossed reduced the size of the army. The reduction is most dramatic when crossing the Alps. Minard has numbers printed in his flowing lines indicating the number of soldiers before various crossings. An army of 96,000 leaves Spain. That number is reduced at each river and mountain crossing. After crossing the Alps, Hannibal enters the Po River Valley with only 26,000 troops. The invasion, which included several battles where Hannibal was victorious, eventually led to stalemate and his failure to conquer Rome.

Minard chose to print this directly above the second diagram titled Figurative map of the successive losses of the French army during the Russian campaign, 1812–1813. The position, title, technique, and color of the two diagrams suggest they illustrate a parallel relationship between the two events, one from Ancient and the other from Contemporary History. Without looking at the details, the common visual message is “Army size diminishes over distance”. The sheer size of the contemporary army contrasts with the ancient one. Two thousand years ago, the band representing a large army was 96,000. The band of Napoleon’s army represents 422,000. The ancient example illustrates the reduction  of the invading force which ultimately led to defeat. The modern example shows the more dramatic devastation of invasion, stalemate, and adds the black band of retreat.

“The Napoleon graphic manages to integrate six data variables in a condensed representation devoid of visual clutter, “ to quote Rendgen’s concise summary. Why was Charles Joseph Minard, Inspector General of Bridges and Roads in Retirement, transforming multiple data variables into a single coherent image? Who was he trying to communicate with in November of 1869 and what was he trying to say?

Minard was born in Dijon in 1781. He attended high school during the first French Revolution and completed his training as a civil engineer in 1803 during the First Empire of Napoleon 1st. He served as a senior government engineer in charge of national infrastructure, supervising canals and planning railroads, through periods of shifting monarchy, republics, and empires. In 1831 he became a professor at the School of Roads and Bridges in Paris where he was trained. He continued to fulfill multiple roles as a senior engineer and educator for another twenty years. He was required to retire at the age of seventy in 1851. During the decades of his service, the French government went through dramatic upheavals, moving from monarchy to republic to the election of Louis Napoleon, a nephew of Napoleon 1st, as president in 1848. Through a series of political maneuvers, this politician went from President of the Second Republic to King of France. Finally he declared himself Emperor Napoleon III. This is why Minard’s footnote mentions his diagrams being placed “before the Emperor”.

Minard produced more than fifty diagrams during his retirement. As a member of the elite government meritocracy, Minard had access to data sets from publications and government agencies. He spent nearly two decades producing several visualizations each year, each diagram based on statistical data having to do with the national and international flow of goods and people. Each diagram was printed at a local lithography company and sent to a list of people in the French government. The only evidence we have of their reception is an oil portrait of a government minister, Eugène Rouher, in which one of Minard’s diagrams appears draped across a chair.

Minard produced two exceptions to this pattern of data sets. In 1865, in addition to maps of the postal districts of Paris and the quantity and routes of international rail travel, he created a map on an historical military theme. The print titled Similarities of the strategic dispositions of Charlemagne and Napoleon Ist is a single sheet with two maps, arranged side by side. The maps show the similarity of military position used by Charlemagne against the Huns in 791 and by Napoleon Ist against the Austrian and Russian army in 1805. Both maps show the same region around Vienna. The theme here was visual similarity separated by a thousand years.

The second exception was the diagram we all know and admire. I can only speculate as to what motivated Minard that year to produce this comparison of two devastating military failures. By its second decade, the imperial ambitions of Emperor Napoleon III had produced many international interventions intended to expand French influence and territorial ambitions. He sent troops to Mexico in an attempt to establish a monarchy there, which failed. He supported military interventions in Algeria, Senegal, Southeast Asia, China, and Korea, which led to the establishment of the French colonies in Africa and Indochina. He established competing alliances against Prussia by projecting his power in Europe. 

Minard was in his 88th year when he printed this diagram in November of 1869. Political conflict with the Prussians was growing. The elite of Paris knew their Emperor was in very poor health. 

The octogenarian Minard chose to design a diagram that documented two dramatic military failures. He compared Hannibal’s decision to march his army against Rome, which ultimately resulted in the destruction of his own homeland, to the decision by the Emperor of the First Empire to project his power by invading Russia, which led to the destruction of his army and the end of his regime. Then he had this diagram of the classical Folly of the Past and the contemporary Folly of the Present printed. Both ideas were supported by data. For the Folly of the Present, he made sure to include very specific details: the specific locations where troop numbers declined, the names of towns and rivers, the time and temperature during the retreat. He had this finely-printed visualization delivered to the elite of the Second Empire.

Despite all that effort, the best statistical graphic ever drawn did not prevent the next Folly of the Present. 

Six months later, the Emperor’s projection of political power in Spain triggered the Franco-Prussian War. The French army was defeated by the Prussians, the Emperor was captured, and the Empire collapsed. As news of the defeat and the German army approaching Paris arrived in the Minard household, the designer of the best statistical graphic ever drawn made the decision to join the flood of escaping refugees. This description of the events that followed is from Minard’s obituary, written by his son-in-law (Dawn Finley’s translation)

In his later years, the bodily infirmities grew; he moved with more and more difficulty, but he worked always with the same ardor. He received freely those who came to see him, and he held them by the delight of his conversation. His surprising memory, his intelligence as alive as always, his regular habits, his sober life, the care with which his family surrounded him, all put at a distance the idea of a coming end. But faced with the progress of the Prussian army his imagination carried him away; and after some hesitation he decided all of a sudden, Sunday September 11, 1870, to leave Paris, his books, his papers, his intellectual riches and the office which he occupied for twenty-five years. Leaning on crutches, in the middle of this throng of women, of children and of old people who fled as he did, he left for Bordeaux with one part of his family, carrying only one light bag and some studies already begun. He endured very well the fatigues of a night journey, and barely installed at Bordeaux, without other resources than his memory, he reapplied himself to work; but six weeks after his arrival, as strongly frightened of the present as of the future, he was taken for three days by an irresistible fever, and on October 24 he returned [his] soul, full with gratitude towards God, according to his expressions, for the portion of happiness which had been given to him on this earth.

What history teaches

Gertrude Stein, the American-French immigrant LGBTQ+ writer, wrote “If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso” about her friend Pablo Picasso, the Spanish-French immigrant painter, a man who can be described as an abusive male partner to the many women in his life. 

Her text will not fit in a social media post. It is short, not a simple text, and not an easy thing to read. But it is fun to read it out loud.

It begins:

If I told him would he like it.

Would he like it if I told him. Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it.

and ends:

Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.

This history demonstrates that statistical graphics devoid of visual clutter do not disarm despots. 

Do you believe that we gain a better understanding of the world by looking at statistical graphics?

If your answer is “yes” then apply your talents to improving the current situation.

Second Trump Administration, Day 27

The post Napoleon, Trump, and the Best Statistical Graphic Ever Drawn appeared first on Nightingale.

One reason to envy information designers of yesterday is the big canvases they got to play with. Look at this 1831 timeline compared to my iPhone. Big, right?

Time goes to the right. Different empires get their own swim lanes and colorful designations. Maybe you’ve seen something similar to this before.

But if you squint and read its title, you will see that this is Plate 1. The timeline keeps going . . . and going!

An Embellished Chart of General History and Chronology is an extraordinary work of chronography from 1831 London. Considering the history of colorful timelines, it stands out in many ways:

1. It is huge.
2. It is relatively early.
3. It seems unknown to modern researchers.
4. It is by a woman.

Frances Harriet Lightfoot published her chronology when she was 29 years old. More on her in a bit.

The design

Seven of the chronology’s plates fold out, including Plate 4, below. It’s a vertical monster—about 3 feet tall covering the final 500 years of the BC era. I count 134 distinct geopolitical rows.

If we zoom to the Golden Age of Athens on the same plate you can appreciate the chronology’s level of detail. I particularly like how years specific to events are labeled.

Lightfoot’s design jumps scales in the AD era. The same horizontal space is used to detail only 100 years, giving five times more room to illustrate history.

If we fly to the Roman Civil wars of the Tetrarchy we see how crazy a single lane can get!

Lightfoot’s volume begins with a three-paragraph preface, where she refers to herself in the third person:

. . . a work which is the offspring of research rather than of genius ; and it appeared to her that the study of Chronology might be rendered more attractive to the rising generation, by a new arrangement, in the form of the Chronological Tables, combining simplicity with comprehensiveness. . . .

She also includes a list of subscribing sponsors, and dozens of reference pages split between a long table of remarkable events not noticed in the chart, and table of celebrated persons grouped by theme (geographers, mathematicians, poets, etc.).

I studied two copies of Lightfoot’s chronology for this essay. Most of the images you see are from photography recently published by the David Rumsey Map Collection. I also consulted my own recently acquired copy. It’s fun comparing the differences in their hand coloring.

To me, the sensation of discovering and reading this work is overwhelming. As much as I have enjoyed its colors, my deepest curiosity is reserved for its creator.

Who is Miss Lightfoot? How did she come to create this monumental piece of information design? Why have I never heard of her?

After spending several days studying census, newspaper, and other public records, I have pieced together what I believe to be her first biographical sketch.

Meet Frances Harriet

Frances Harriet Lightfoot was born around 1802 in Lambeth, Surrey. She was a distinguished composer and author whose works left a broad mark in the 19th century.

Lightfoot signed off on the publication of her chronology from 14 Great James Street, New Palace (London) on October 1, 1831. It received coverage in the Sun (London) newspaper the following month:

“This work is so ingeniously arranged as to afford at once glance a clear and comprehensive representation of the state of all known contemporary nations, from the Deluge to the present period. A system better calculated to facilitate the acquisition of this most puzzling, yet most valuable part of historical knowledge could hardly, we should think, be imagined; but we are not aware of even the existence of another book which possesses similar advantages, or has any claims to rival it in the public estimation.”

—Sun newspaper, 30 November 1831

About 136 copies of the chronology were listed for subscribers, including a resident of Willsbridge House, indicating an early connection to Lightfoot’s future home. The subscriber list featured a varied and high-status group, including dukes, earls, admirals, baronets, and notable politicians, reflecting the publication’s support by many elites of society.

Today, about 15 copies of the work survive according to WorldCat, with ten in the UK and five in the USA.

Professorial ventures

A decade after the chronology’s publication, in 1841, Lightfoot lived with her father and her mother, also Frances Lightfoot. They were still at 14 James Street in the parish of St Margaret, Westminster, Middlesex. In addition to her parents, Frances Harriet, listed as a “Professor of Music,” lived with three other women.

In addition to her 1831 publication, Lightfoot authored A Genealogical List of the Sovereigns of England (1838), a stylized table across 13 pages.

She also published French Participles Explained and Made Easy in 1845, showcasing her diverse intellectual interests. But Lightfoot’s most prolific format was musical scores. Between 1828 and 1855, her compositions included ballads, songs, and duets, often collaborating with women lyricists. These musical pursuits align with her listed professional occupation of “Professor of Music” and her involvement in education, as reflected in her census household records, which frequently included pupils and other boarders.

By 1851, Frances Harriet had moved to 41 Cadogan Place in the prestigious Belgravia neighborhood of London where she was now head of a household including her 86-year-old mother, and several other women, including one visiting teacher, a pupil, and servants. There, she continued her professional pursuits, again listed as a “Professor of Music,” demonstrating her enduring commitment to education and the arts:

In 1861, Frances Harriet was recorded as a “School Mistress” at Willsbridge House in Bitton and Oldland. This residence, later known as Willsbridge Castle, has some musical roots. Built circa 1730 for John Pearsall, it passed through the Pearsall family, including composer Robert Lucas de Pearsall, known for his madrigals and Anglican church music. The house’s connection to such a prominent musical figure aligns with Frances Harriet’s own musical background.

Across 1851 and 1861 censuses, Lightfoot’s household included teachers and students, all women, reflecting her ongoing commitment to education and music.

Final years and legacy

Frances Harriet Lightfoot passed away aged 71 years old on July 14, 1873, at Willsbridge House. She was buried five days later at St. Mary Churchyard, Bitton, South Gloucestershire. Her will named two executors, with an estate valued under £600.

Lightfoot’s one-acre residence was auctioned the following January at the White Lion Hotel, Broad Street, Bristol. Willsbridge House was described as a substantial mansion with extensive amenities including stables, a coach house, a detached laundry, and well-maintained gardens, highlighted the grandeur of her home. The house itself featured spacious cellars, multiple reception rooms, numerous bedrooms, and a garden stocked with fruit trees and an abundant mineral spring. Its proximity to the Bitton Station on the Midland Railway further underscored its prime location.

These connections paint a picture of Frances Harriet Lightfoot as a well-connected, intellectually versatile, and respected figure in the musical circles of her time. They also suggest a woman who maintained significant properties and professional roles, demonstrating both stability and influence.

The consistent reference to Lightfoot as a spinster in various documents, including her will, indicates she remained unmarried throughout her life, which was relatively uncommon for women of her time and social status. This detail might have influenced her professional focus and independence.

Frances Harriet Lightfoot’s life reflects a woman deeply embedded in the intellectual and artistic fabric of her time. I am excited to learn about what you find studying her colossal chronology.

Lightfoot is a good reminder that the constellation of spectacular historic designs is only partially visible to our modern eyes. I look forward to seeing more.

Republished from https://www.chartography.net/p/colossal-chronography – sign up, it’s great!

The post Colossal Chronography: Frances Harriet Lightfoot’s 1831 Marvel appeared first on Nightingale.

If you had asked me six months ago if I cared about this, I would have said no. But I became enchanted by Galileo’s drawing of Saturn in Edward Tufte’s book Envisioning Information with the words, “Saturn, a drawing, a word, a noun. The wonderful becomes familiar and the familiar wonderful.” Then later, when attending a one-day course where Tufte was presenting, I saw his eyes fill with excitement as he walked around the room holding the first edition of Galileo’s book with the Saturn drawing. It was impossible to forget.

One person’s genuine enthusiasm about data can be infectious and have a lasting impact. Tufte’s books were filled with visualizations from all over the world, inspiring me to also collect charming data visualizations and share them with others. Or as author Austin Kleon would say, “Steal like an artist.” I wanted to find my “Saturn” and these were the six discoveries I found in the ongoing process.

Honil gangni yeokdae gukdo jido, also known as Kangnido, is the oldest world map in Korea with 130 places named across Europe, Africa, and Asia. The map is titled “Map of Integrated Lands and Regions of Historical Countries and Capitals” with capital cities written in a smaller font size beneath. At the bottom of the map, the purpose of the map is written: “The world is very wide… It is difficult to outline every information in a few letters, so the map is brief… The saying ‘You can know the world without even leaving the door’ refers to this map as its completeness is orderly and pleasing to the eye. Most importantly, understanding geography through maps and books would be exceptionally helpful in governing a country.”

What’s notable about this map is how enormous both China and Korea look. Sinocentrism — or the view that China is the cultural, political, and economic center of the world — did not evade Korean cartographers who drew China in the center with major cities of the Yuan Dynasty (a Mongol-led imperial dynasty of China) marked in red. While China covers almost half of the map, Korea takes up the majority of the right corner as the second most important nation. According to the University of Richmond, “This and later Japanese world maps suggest that East Asian kingdoms placed themselves second to China in geographic importance depending on how much influence they had in the creation of the map (Sung). This difference shows how mapping is solely a proposition of how certain groups of people see the world rather than maps being representations of pure spatial data.”

The second visualization was created by Yi Hwang, also known as T’oegye. If you ever visit Korea, his portrait is seen on a 1,000 won bill as he is regarded as one of the most honored thinkers of Korean Neo-Confucianism. His book The Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning was completed in 1568 and presented to the young 17-year-old King Seonjo of Joseon Dynasty to guide him in the Confucian way of an honorable kingship (London Korean Links). The diagram above is the first out of ten lessons prepared by 68-year-old T’oegye, explaining the metaphysical concept of Taeguk; it denotes the harmony between the negative cosmic forces (yin) and the positive cosmic forces (yang). The five layers of circles explains the stages of energy as it transforms from the “supreme ultimate (Taeguk)” to “yin and yang” to “union of yin yang leading to five phases of metal, wood, water, fire, and earth” to “formation of male and female” to “reinterpretation of Taeguk.”

According to Michael C. Kalton, the first Westerner to receive the prize from the International T’oegyehak Study Institute, the visualization concludes, “All things evolve and are produced by transformations of form. Each thing has its own nature but all are the one Supreme Ultimate.” This was and still is one of the most fundamental concepts in Korea, as seen in the national flag.

Korea’s first line chart was published by the Dong-a Ilbo newspaper on January 1, 1936. What’s notable about this visualization is the x-axis: Instead of years, numbers 5 to 9 are listed. Japan annexed Korea in 1910 and the traditional Japanese calendar was based on the reign period of the emperor. For example, Shōwa 5 meant year 5 of the reign of Emperor Shōwa or 1930. Therefore we can interpret the x-axis as 1930-1934. The main message was to show the divergence between the Japanese and British textile industry performance as seen by the positive trend line labeled as Japan and the dotted downward line for Great Britain with the United States’ drawn in between. 

The grouped bar chart is equally interesting. It outlines five countries’ import and export performance, with the y-axis consisting of five countries further divided by years between Shōwa 4 to 9 (1929-1934) and the x-axis divided into two: the left side depicting export levels and the right side outlining import levels. What’s peculiar about this chart is that the year 1929 is used as a metric of comparison for the following years so every country begins with both export and import levels of 100 in 1929. Japan on top shows a quick bounce back after two years of decrease while the rest of the chart draws a gloomier economic outlook with no recovery.

The main message for both line and bar charts published on Dong-a Ilbo in 1936 was to highlight Japan’s economic boom in comparison to other countries’ struggling status quo.

For the 6th annual Korea Data Journalism Award in 2023, an interactive website and article titled “Let the Truck Drivers Rest” won the Data Visualization of the Year award. Prior to the publication, reporters tracked 59,296 trucks’ data for a month in April 2022 and surveyed 25,000 truck drivers. In this particular visualization, they accompanied and recorded one truck driver’s daily routine for 24 hours. Yellow color is for active driving time and black is for when the driver stops the truck. The line chart on the left is the geographic footprint whereas the stacked bar chart on the right side is the timestamp of each geographic location. The driver spends nine hours driving and 12 hours loading/unloading packages at hubs. 

The main message of this illustration is that the truck driver only had one hour to sleep (parked at a highway rest stop) out of the 24 hours and ate only once, at 10pm. Sleep deprived truck drivers are at risk of fatal car crashes but the driver shares that there’s little choice: He gets paid based on the deliveries so he often ends the day with $45 after costs, which is below the minimum wage standards. If he takes a rest, he will make even lower profit.

Last but not least, @DataSquirrel is a YouTube channel that has posted data visualization videos since 2019. In total, more than 61 million views and 143,000+ channel subscribers have been accumulated. 15 videos generated more than 1 million views with the most popular video being “Korean Celebrities’ YouTube Channels Subscriber Ranking Change (2017-2020)” with 3.3 million views. From ranking of mukbang YouTubers’ subscribers to the number of convenience stores in South Korea by brands, DataSquirrel is filled with interesting topics. But who knew a data visualization YouTube channel would be popular?

Conclusion

“If the data is boring, then you have the wrong data.” Described by The New York Times as “the Leonardo da Vinci of Data,” Edward Tufte inspired me to express and share my enthusiasm with others. Nicknamed “The Land Of the Morning Calm,” Korea is a country filled with wonders and as I continue to learn about data visualization, I want to compile and translate works in hopes that the global audience sees what I feel with my heart.

The post A Brief and Inspiring History of Data Visualization in Korea appeared first on Nightingale.

Unfold it to drape across your couch like a blanket or examine it on a table like a road map. The Temple operates as a self-documenting system to understand and memorize a world history narrative. It is a perspective rendering of a vast hall, in which time is the distance from the back wall of Creation. The wall pillars are centuries holding up time bands of ceiling labeled with categories of famous people arranged. The pillars on the right display the names of famous rulers. At the foot of the pillars world events flow towards our eye on the left while the names of battles flow forward on the right.

When Richard Saul Wurman proposed five ways to organize information, he described Time as “an easily understandable framework from which changes can be observed and comparisons made.” (Information Anxiety 2, 41). While Wurman was trained as an architect, he was not suggesting that time would be a good principle for designing a building. He had something more linear and singular in mind, a chronological chart of events, the now familiar one-dimensional timeline. 

Emma Willard had something much more ambitious in mind when she published her first perspective time chart, “Pictures of Nations or Perspective Sketch of the Course of Empire” in Atlas to Accompany a System of Universal History In 1836. The Picture of Nations is reproduced in this beautifully designed book along with the other technique Willard excelled at, the chronological series of maps. The selection is edited with extensive commentary by the historian Susan Schulten. There are pages where Willard speaks for herself, as in this quote:

Mere straight lines not wrought into a picture, and presenting no form of comeliness to the eye, are unattractive. The young (and the old too) do not feel any wish to look at them, and thus they carry away no distinct impression. They are like a succession of monotonous sounds, which no one remembers; while the arrangement of sounds in tunes, or lines in pictures, are attended to with pleasure, and easily remembered. (70)

To which Schulten adds, “Willard distinguished ‘pictures’ of information from ‘mere’ timelines in that the former added up to something greater than just the display of data.” Anyone involved in information design will agree. We can be drawn into the narrative of history as a building, of events distant in time and in space flowing towards us, of pillars and ceilings engraved with the names of famous men and a few queens, an arrangement of events we should memorize to understand the past. Willard’s work is among the Information Graphic Visionaries series because she made that leap towards the memorable. Without these innovative diagrams and history maps, her textbooks would be as invisible today as those of her more conventional male contemporaries. 

Inventing a nation in timelines

Schulten and others have written eloquently about Willard as a pioneer of women’s education. She is a representative of the first born-American generation, a unique place in the American history she chose to represent in her maps and timelines. A child of a colonial-era New England farming family—she, her students, and the readers of her textbooks were not in England anymore. They were the first citizens to define their new country’s territory and history. 

One pillar of Willard’s Temple, already a cornerstone of this new identity, was the adoption of Columbus as the starting point of American history. The first public celebration of Columbus Day was organized in 1792 by a New York political club. They embraced  the 300^th anniversary of an event that took place in the Caribbean, honoring a man who never touched or acknowledged the existence of North America as the start of a national identity. This group called themselves the Society of St. Tammany, the Sons of St. Tammany, or the Columbian Order. Tammany Societies were nativist political clubs created during the Revolutionary War to support the new republic, and Columbia became a favored term for the new nation. Tammany was a reference to Tamamend, a mythical leader of the Delaware (Lenni Lenape), and society members appropriated indigenous titles to support their sense of ‘nativeness’. From Willard’s generation onwards, American history began by counting 300 years backwards from 1792.

While Willard’s Temple design is entirely original, it is also a mashup of previous authors’ timeline techniques and metaphors. Schulten’s essay does an excellent job of explaining these predecessors and influences. I will add a few more examples and place Willard’s work conceptually along two axes: as a timeline that synchronizes sacred and profane historical ideas and as an expression of American nationalist narrative. With that in mind, let us look at what Willard built her temple from, and what she chose to include and exclude from its floor, ceiling, and pillars, as well as from her maps.

Rosenberg and Grafton begin Cartographies of Time with the questions “What does history look like? How do you draw time?” This is the wrong question to ask. Designing a timeline does not revolve around the question of what time looks like. A timeline is a narrative constructed from visual signposts. Any narrative has a beginning, middle and end. The designer must address three questions: where does time begin, what does it include and where does it end? Once these questions are answered, the appearance of time can have any form that supports the visual logic of sequence.

For the students of Willard’s Troy Female Seminary, the beginning of time had to be the date proposed by Bishop Ussher’s 17^th century analysis of the Book of Genesis, four thousand and four years before the birth of Christ. Time starts with the names of people and events in the Bible, and continues to ancient Greek and Roman texts, concluding with events remembered by modern European nations. Willard embraced this scheme and steadfastly stuck with it throughout her work. Her end of time took the shape of twenty-one modern nations grouped into four categories: Northern Europe outside the Roman Empire, Europe formed from the Roman Empire, Mahometan (Islamic), and Pagan Nations. The exception in these categories were “those of the Western Continent” included in the Roman Empire nations, the parting of the English and Iberian colonial rivers to reveal the Republic of America, Mexico and South American Republics. Given pride of place, these new creations were at the center of history.

Detail from Temple of Time poster, present time (1846) showing the Americas, Emma Willard, Maps of History, Susan Schulten, 2022

Châtelain’s 18th century method

There were other approaches to representing time that did not combine Biblical, Classical and Modern sources. Henri Abraham Châtelain made a different choice with similar material a hundred years earlier. His Atlas historique, which went through several editions in the early 1700s, was a multi-volume book of maps, lineage diagrams, and essays summarizing the European understanding of the world. Châtelain’s timeline of human history was a presentation of Church and State History side by side rather than combining them or suppressing one view for the other. His solution was simultaneity rather than synthesis. The two-page spread of the Chaine de l’histoire sacrée (Chain of sacred history) and Chaine de l’histoire prophane (Chain of profane history) share a similar time scale. Time begins using Ussher’s date for the creation of the world, though dates are labeled forwards to 4000 (our conventional Year 0) rather than backwards, then continue to 1713 (the present). The facing pages describe parallel lineages of Church history, visualizes Old Testament patriarchs and kings flowing into dead branches of Roman Jerusalem, then on to the Western and Eastern church. State history begins with Assyrian, Egyptian and Italian monarchs, along with a reference to, the Chinese empire..

Chaine de L’Histoire Sacrée : Chain De L’Histoire Prophane, Atlas historique, Tom I. No. 3. Henri Abraham Châtelain, 1718 (David Rumsey Historical Map Collection)

Châtelain was a French Huguenot minister who preached in London and Amsterdam; an artist-engraver who designed and drew many of the plates and maps included in the books he published, and essentially a person who combined sacred and profane practice in his own life. He may have had business and political reasons for omitting any reference to the Reformation in his visualization of sacred time.

Châtelain’s publications described the world by combining maps, timelines, and text. The atlas documented an interconnected world defined by European international trade and travel. While most of the globe is represented in the maps and texts, a notable exception is the interior and western coast of North America. It is worthwhile having a close look at the map that covers the same area that Willard will include in her historical map series. 

Map of Canada or New France, and the Discoveries Made There (Carte du Canada ou de la Nouvelle France, & des Découvertes qui y ont été faites) was based on the work of the cartographer Guillaume De L’Isle. It presents a view of North America gazing northwest. embracing the entire Great Lakes and upper Mississippi basin.  Most of the map is covered with the names of the indigenous nations that made up the population of Canada ou Nouvelle France. 

Detail of Carte du Canada ou de la Nouvelle France, & des Découvertes qui y ont été faites, Atlas historique, Tom VI. No. 20. Henri Abraham Châtelain, 1718 (David Rumsey Historical Map Collection)

This map of New France is not the map of a nation. De L’isle has drawn a territory in which French and English settlements were coexisting and trading with indigenous populations. In his most recent re-evaluation of North America during this period, Pekka Hämäläinen makes the argument that New France was an alliance among French settlers and indigenous nations to support extractive trade in exchange for useful technologies. “In a striking contrast to most English colonies,” he writes, “New France was built on close collaboration with the Indians, who became trading partners, military allies, and kin over the course of the seventeenth century.” (Indigenous Continent, 209) He makes a convincing case that it was the competition among the indigenous nations, fueled by intentional or unintentional European trade, rather than European imperial policies, that determined where settlements could survive. The region south of Lake Ontario in the De L’Isle map is labeled Iroquois, a label I will come back to when discussing Willard’s 1828 textbook below. The many groups and settlements shown on this French map demonstrate just how not empty North America was. Reading Hämäläinen’s historical narrative alongside Maps of History reveals how American Federalist nationalism shaped the way Willard represented European and indigenous people.

By the time Willard is making her maps and timelines, North America is not just a place in a World Atlas, it is the place where the American nation enters world history. How did this first-generation information visionary integrate her view of American history with the history of the world? Glancing back at the Temple of Time, we can see that the five pillars closest to the present on the left represent the New World. Going further back in time, these pillars are blank. “King Philip 1675” inscribed on the pillar for the 17^th century is the only trace of indigenous American culture. The inscription urges the students of Troy Female Academy to remember Metacomet, the Wampanoag military leader, renamed King Philip by the English, a reference to the son of Alexander the Great. Willard made a place for her proto-nation’s first serious military enemy, the leader who tried but failed to drive the European settlers out of New England. 

Detail from Temple of Time poster, showing significant dates on the century pillars for the Americas, Emma Willard, Maps of History, Susan Schulten, 2022

North America in charts, streams, and pillars

Willard’s representation of North America is a series of choices. We can appreciate the choices she makes by looking at similar materials in timelines by Joseph Priestley and Friedrich Strass. Priestley starts time at 1200 B.C. based on textual evidence from the Shepherd Kings, Egyptians, and Israelites. His sense of historical time is based on written texts rather than religious faith. Empires rise and fall without reference to the light of a messiah. His Unitarian theology counts down to zero at the birth of Christ marked only by a symbol –    –  and up again to 1800. All modern nations (Italy) or regions (Africa) are given a horizontal band to label their transition from one empire or kingdom to the next. In his row of empires that become the American continents, Priestley finds a place for the 13^th century founding of the Kingdom of Peru and the Empire of Mexico, so they can transition to SPANISH in the 16^th century. The other labels that make up this row are European names and nationalities. 

Detail of the Americas from A new chart of history, Joseph Priestley, 1769 (David Rumsey Historical Map Collection)

Friedrich Strass’ Der Strom der Zeiten (Streams of Time) begins time the same way Willard does. The world emerges from the clouds in 4004 and a series of cultural streams begin to flow downward to the present. The only reference to the Americas are small colonial side channels flowing into and out of the rivers of French, Spanish, Portuguese, and English history near the bottom of the chart. 

Detail of present time (1803) for the streams of Spain, Portugal, England, Der Strom der Zeiten/Streams of Time, Friedrich Strass, 1803 (David Rumsey Historical Map Collection)

The Americanness of the Temple of Time can also be seen in how Willard absorbed and modified another feature of Priestley’s system, categories of famous people. Priestley’s Chart of Biography grouped famous individuals into six categories and included 2000 names.  Statesmen and Warriors were one category. Both theological and political philosophers were grouped in Divines and Metaphysicians. He had the agenda of religious dissent and social reform behind his selection and categorization of historical figures.

Willard was set on establishing historical conventions rather than challenging them. She uses a simplified approach, with five categories and about 300 names. Europeans who claimed American territory (Columbus, Cabot, De Gama, Gilbert, Verazani [sic], Smith) are in Philosophers, Discoverers &c. Religious leaders who founded English colonies (Penn, R. Williams) are Theologians. The Spanish who took over in Central and South American nations (Cortez and Pizarro) are in Warriors. 

Schulten notes that the floor of Willard’s Temple evolved from her earlier Picture of Nations, and both can be compared to Priestley’s and Strass’ timelines. It is not surprising that these European and American timelines were Eurocentric. It is more surprising to note the non-European people and events they chose to include or omit. There is far more non-European history in Priestley’s 18^th century chart than Willard includes sixty years later. While it starts with entirely Mediterranean sources, the top third of present time in Priestley’s chart resolves into America, Africa, China, and India. He uses color to show how the Mongolian Empire included China, Persia, Turkey and Russia.

The metaphor of streams and the downward (vertical) flow of Strass’ design suggests that the present world flows from the people that emerged from Creation, a world that included the Chinese. Modern history flows from these original streams, though Strass has to add a few examples of later creation to account for German and Nordic origins. 

Willard starts with a similar set of Mediterranean sources emerging from Creation. She recognizes India and China much later than her predecessors. Their streams only appear after the light that represents the birth of Christ. The part of the floor that will become the Pagan Nations has no content until “Degama [sic] discovers India” and European trade begins. She makes chronological mistakes in Asian history, placing Jenghis Khan and Tamerlaine in the correct century on the pillars but reversing their position on the floor.

Priestley’s Africa shows six hundred years of history leading to the 18^th century North African kingdoms of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli.

Detail of showing the nations of North Africa from A new chart of history, Joseph Priestley, 1769 (David Rumsey Historical Map Collection)

Willard’s American version has no Africa per se. The Temple of Time does show Egypt and adds Barbary between Turkey and Persia. A stream emerges on the floor from the Moguls that reads, “The Two Brothers Barbarosso Found the Piratical States of Barbary”.  It ends with the text, “First brought to terms by the Americans”. This is a reference to the Barbary Wars, also remembered as “the shores of Tripoli” in the American Marine’s Hymn.  It also illustrates that one criteria for inclusion in history is warfare.

Detail from the Temple of Time showing the place of Barbary between Turkey and Persia, with text referring to the Barbary Wars.

Native Americans as barbarians that vanish and reappear

The wars between indigenous nations and the English colonies and the new United States are given more attention in her historical maps than in her timelines.  She sets the stage with a map that presents the area that would become the United States before European settlements: Locations and Wanderings of the Aboriginal Tribes.

What was this image based on and what purpose did it serve? Willard was an educator and a writer of history books, not a proto-ethnographer. Schulten’s essay, “A Graphic Mind”, provides an answer. Before creating her History of the United States, Willard published her Ancient Atlas, a book of maps to support the teaching of Mediterranean/European history. “The most interesting of these was the map of barbarian invasions, which collapsed centuries of migration across Europe onto a single image,” Schulten writes. She points out that the map, titled Migrations, Settlements &c. of Barbarous Tribes, was adapted from the 1820 American edition of the Lesage Atlas. That map, titled Invasion of the Barbarians their origin, settlements, dispersion, &c., illustrates a text that summarizes the movement of tribes invading the Western Roman Empire from the 4^th century. The map shows groups from Scandinavia, Central Asia, and North Africa tracing colorful lines across Europe.

Left: Detail of Iberia from Geographical and Historical Map of the Incursions of the Barbarians, Incursion of the Barbarians, their origin, settlements, dispersion, &c., A Complete Genealogical, Historical, Chronological, And Geographical Atlas; Being A General Guide To History, Both Ancient And Modern … According To The Plan Of Le Sage, Greatly Improved. The Whole Forming A Complete System Of History And Geography. 1820 (David Rumsey Historical Map Collection). Right: Detail of Ibera from Map No, VI, Migrations, Settlements &c. of barbarous Tribes illustrating the account which is given of them in Willard’s Ancient Geography, Ancient Atlas to Accompany Universal Geography, Emma Willard, 1827. (David Rumsey Historical Map Collection). 

A look at migrations across the Iberian peninsula in both of these maps shows how Willard simplified the visual language introduced in Lesage. She removes much of the geographic detail and adds directional arrows. She employed the same visual language in her Locations and Wanderings map to suggest the changing location of indigenous groups before and during the English colonial period. In the context of Ancient History, the movement of these tribes was a disruption of the Roman Imperial order, until ultimately Burgundians founded Burgundy, Lombards settled Lombardy, and Normans built up the same sites they had looted and burned in Normandy. 

Detail of Introductory Map To Accompany Willard’s History Of The United States, Locations and Wanderings of the Aboriginal Tribes, A Series of Maps to Willard’s History of the United States, Or, Republic Of America. 1829. (David Rumsey Historical Map Collection)

For the historical atlas of America, she starts with a chapter describing theories of how people arrived in the Americas (across the Bering Strait, up the Mississippi river network) and another that enumerates “the Principal Indian Confederacies as found by European Discoverers.” The visualization for this section is analogous to the wanderings of Old World barbarians. Surrounded by oval labels that claim no territory, these tribes are neither kingdoms or states. The invading arrows of Iroquois or Five Nations project southwards into Irocoisia Proper. The Tuscaroras move from south to north while the Lenni Lenape move from east to west, and the Shawanese wander from upper Florida to the Ohio River network. The movement of the confederacies introduces their anticipated transient role in American history. 

In the maps accompanying Part 1 of her four-part chronology, all indigenous nations vanish from the interior. Her maps focus on the thin strips of coastline and rivers that made up the English colonial world. Indigenous people reappear as insets labeled Places Mentioned in the History of the Pequod War in the Third Map of 1643 and Places Mentioned in the History of King Philip’s War in the Fourth Map of 1692. The educational value is memorizing the names of the combatants and locations of the wars that traumatized the English colonies. The Fifth Map of 1755 shows the names of the indigenous people who controlled the interior of the southern colonies—Tuscarora, Cawataba, Congaree, Yamasee, Cherokee, and Apalachee—but the area west of the coastal rivers remains empty. It is only in the Sixth Map of 1765 that she actually includes an indigenous nation with territory, the Country of the Six Nations. Here she acknowledges that before the American Revolution the Iroquois Confederacy controlled all of what is now New York State west of the Hudson Valley.

Detail of Sixth Map or Map Of 1763 showing Iroquois territory before the American Revolution. (David Rumsey Historical Map Collection)

The Appearance of the American Far West

In the Ninth Map of 1826, referred to in the History as the Map of the Present Day, many of the previously excluded nations represented in the De L’Isle map of New France reappear. Her introductory map showed the unwandering people of the southeast—Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek. In 1826 they were still in their towns, but the Indian Removal Act of 1830 is about to expel them from the newly created states of Mississippi and Alabama. The other prehistoric wandering tribes are gone, replaced by people who have been engaged with French and British colonial trade for generations, now framed inside recently created American states. Illinois is land “ceded by the Kaskaskias” and Arkansas is “part of the tract ceded by the Quapaws”.

Ninth Map or Map of 1826, A Series of Maps to Willard’s History of the United States, Or, Republic Of America. 1829. (David Rumsey Historical Map Collection)

But the most interesting detail of the Map of 1826 is the depiction of the Far West in the upper left. The North West Territory is labeled, Those lands possessed in common by the Sioux, Chippewas, Winnebago, and Sauks, an assertion that would have been news to the people who lived there. The western boundary of this territory is the upper Mississippi.

Beyond that is a space with no boundaries labeled Sioux Indians or Naudowessies. It was into that blank space that George Catlin went to seek his fortune in 1830. Catlin, born in 1796, was twelve years younger than Emma Willard, but it is still fair to describe him as being of that same born-American generation. His family background was similar to Willard’s, with farm family roots in Connecticut. When the young Catlin was sent by his father to study and practice law in Litchfield, Connecticut, Willard was already married and establishing schools for girls in Middlebury, Vermont. By the time Willard moved her school operations to New York state, Catlin had abandoned law to become a painter in Philadelphia. They crossed patrons when Catlin was commissioned to paint a portrait of DeWitt Clinton, the governor whose policies and support attracted Willard to settle in New York. 

Catlin spent six years traveling back and forth to areas west of America’s borders. He completed the first part of his project to paint hundreds of oil paintings of indigenous people and gather a huge collection of material objects. The second part of his plan was to become rich and famous by presenting his work as a public spectacle. Before opening his Indian Gallery in New York City in 1837, he staged a preview exhibit of paintings in Albany and Troy where Willard was a successful textbook author and pioneer of women’s education. There is no indication that she took this opportunity to see Catlin’s show.

I bring up Catlin because of another map, the Outline Map of Indian Localities in 1833. Catlin drew this for his most famous book, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Conditions of the North American Indian. That book was illustrated with engravings from his paintings and published in England after he packed up his collection to tour Europe in the 1840s, the same period when Willard was creating her timelines. Catlin drew this map from his travel notes and stories he collected. Here we finally see North America, undivided by northern and southern boundaries. We see the Great Plains, the Great Basin, and the Pacific Coast not yet separated into territories or states. We can see the buffalo ranges tracking the river networks and the names of the people who lived there.

Outline Map of Indian Localities in 1833, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians, George Catlin, 1842 (North Carolina Digital Collections)

If we place this map of our continent—and not the entire continent, of course, but merely that part we think of as southern Canada, the United States, and a bit of Mexico, omitting the inconvenience of Florida and the Caribbean—beside Willard’s world of 1826, we see how little of the continent was included in that early 19^th century version of American History. 

The visual power of one chart and one map

My comparisons touch on only a select few of the maps and diagrams reproduced in Maps of History. The book includes maps that depict world history, including a series that are adapted from the original work by Edward Quin. It was Quin who created the metaphor of parting clouds to reveal the parts of the globe included in world history. Willard copied this visualization of world history expanding from the Middle East to include Mediterranean Europe, Asia and Africa, and finally the globe including the Americas, adapting Quin’s design into a simpler series of maps. 

The book also reproduces two more ‘chronographer’ diagrams, a name meant to convey a combination of chronology (time) and geography (location). Following the initial Temple or Map of Time (1846), she designed Willard’s English Chronographer (1849), a building with far more detail on its walls, ceiling, and floor than the original temple, with a ceiling that included a new category of Memorable Women. The Chronographer of Ancient History (1851) was the last of these diagrams. It provided more detail for the period between creation and the birth of Christ. All are beautifully reproduced with helpful commentary.

Schulten’s essay and commentary emphasizes how Willard’s designs were meant to communicate the relationships between time and space. She quotes Willard as proudly claiming to have designed diagrams where “time is measured by space, and all time since creation of the world is indicated at once to the eye.”  

The timelines and maps clearly show how Willard was an inventive organizer and educator. Yet her building metaphor, a memory palace in which she selected and placed details for her students to remember, was as divorced from representations of geographic space as Priestley’s parallel rows or Strass’ parallel streams. It was memorable, it was orderly, but it could not simultaneously convey chronology and the relative geography of the Barbary Coast, Persia, and China.

Châtelain and Priestley shared with Willard the same goal of communicating and educating through the strength of our visual channel. In his preface to the Atlas historique, Châtelain wrote: 

La Carte est un secours que l’on fournit par les yeux à l’imagination, sauf à l’entendement après cela d’en faire son profit. (The map is assistance provided by the eye to the imagination, so that our understanding can profit by it.) 

Priestley also had enormous faith in his diagram’s power of communication. Though he wrote many books, he was convinced that visualization was superior to the text for transferring knowledge. In the booklet that accompanied his New Chart of History, he wrote:

If a person carries his eyes horizontally, he sees, in very short time, all the revolutions that have taken place in any particular country, and under whose power it is at present; and this is done with more exactness, and in much less time, than it could have been done by reading. 

Willard clearly inherits this faith in visual communication. The essays and reproductions in Maps of History help the reader appreciate her invention, the breadth of her adaptation, and the ways she viewed history and geography as a single subject. We can also see the choices she made to shape and populate her diagrams and maps. 

The last map Schulten reproduces is a map of an America we are more familiar with today than the New France of 1700 or the twenty-three American states of the 1820s. The United States of America, Historically and Chronologically Divided into Eight Parts is from Last Leaves of American History, a later textbook published in 1853. It shows America from sea to shining sea, covering the same continent that Catlin drew. 

United States of America Historically and Chronologically divided into Eight Parts, Last leaves of American history: comprising a separate history of California, Emma Willard, 1853. (Library of Congress)

Schulten’s commentary on this map provides an important point about Willard’s legacy as an information graphic visionary.

Today, the map appears ordinary, for it has been adapted as one of the central maps of American history textbooks even down to our own day. Indeed, that it has become a fixture of our national history demonstrates its symbolic power. Willard’s lasting contribution was to offer a graphic vision of Manifest Destiny that normalized the nation’s growth and gave it an almost natural, inevitable quality. The continental map includes very little information beyond the sequential parcels across the continent, even erasing any detail from neighboring nations and setting the United States apart in space. American schoolchildren have for generations seen their national expansion as relatively devoid of division or violence. Yet, ironically, it was these far western acquisitions that provoked the sectional animosity of the 1850s, which devolved into the Civil War in 1861. (220-221)

Willard saw the value in images that are simple and easy to remember. The nation is complete, with a top and a bottom, a left and a right, made of parts assembled by charter, treaty, purchase, and decree. This map includes the details we should remember and excludes the complications we don’t need to discuss. 

The decision of what to include and exclude in maps and diagrams is the responsibility of the information designer. The responsibility of the viewer is to recognize that every diagram, every map, is designed from a specific point of view. Maps of History make it possible to admire Willard’s accomplishments and take a critical look at her depiction of American history and America’s place in the history of the world. The contemporary reader can note how many of her choices are still with us in the way we view our present space and time.

The post Inclusion and Exclusion in Emma Willard, Maps of History appeared first on Nightingale.

Now, the year is 12,023. Long gone are the generations who pioneered and attempted to archive information. Long gone are those who understood the importance of history and its significance on building what is now considered present day society. A human approaches a sparse, unmanned area in the desert of what once used to be New Mexico, United States. Large chunks of stone debris are scattered in the sand and there is no one to be found. Engraved on one stone is an earlier form of English along with a pictograph. The human doesn’t understand everything the stone says, but can make out something which frightens them—a warning, or possible threat, of death. With this now in mind, the human hastily passes the area with a mental note to never return, for no good can come from doing so.

What the human didn’t know is roughly 2,150 feet (657 meters) below this stone is nuclear waste deposited 500 generations ago; the warning marker continuing the job it was assigned to do 10,000 years prior.

A high-stakes design project

This is not a hypothetical conceptualized for science fiction, but a scenario real experts have considered at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico. The WIPP is a housing location for the United States’ nuclear waste, including clothing, tools, rags, residues, debris, soil, and other items contaminated with small amounts of plutonium and other man-made radioactive elements. The warning markers for this plant are not currently active, because there is no need to deter people from the area if the site is occupied with a staff. But once the plant decides to close its doors, with the nuclear waste still remaining, proper signage will be critical.

Nearly 30 years ago, teams of anthropologists, archaeologists, architects, astronomers, communicators, designers, engineers, geologists, linguists, material scientists, psychologists, semioticians, and sociologists convened to conceptually design warning markers to physically withstand 10,000 years. Their goal was to come up with a proactive proposal to ensure outsiders would never enter a location housing the country’s nuclear waste, even centuries after the plant ceased operations. It is a once-in-a-lifetime challenge for an information designer—and a story not often shared, though should be.

I had the privilege of sitting down with Jon Lomberg to get a better idea of his role as a designer for this project. Lomberg has held many titles throughout his career, including NASA’s Design Director for the Golden Record on the Voyager Spacecraft and Carl Sagan’s principal artistic collaborator. His work for the WIPP was designed to help clearly communicate to the public the science behind the project and its potential benefits and risks. Lomberg’s role at the WIPP involved working with his multidisciplinary team to understand the technical aspects of the project and to translate this information into visual form.

“It was a thought experiment, but we tried to approach it seriously,” Lomberg said. “One thing we were told was that there were no budgetary restraints. We could design what we want and not worry about building permits or construction costs.”

Considering every scenario

It’s not often data visualization artists or information designers are granted a blank check with no restraints, so where does one’s mind go when all barriers are removed? The group briefly considered making the danger markers from solid gold because of the metal’s stability and durability—it doesn’t corrode or tarnish— but the risk of theft was too high to entertain the idea for very long.

While developing their proposal, the team followed two guiding stars. The first focused on how we interpret narrative. “Most narratives are read from left to right, but […] that is something which is learned,” Lomberg explains. “However, everyone, seemingly by nature, reads from top to bottom.”

The second guiding star was how the narrative is visualized. Icons which require teaching to understand their meaning and significance, like the biohazard icon or alphabets, may lack staying power. This posed a challenge in deciding which symbols or icons could work. 

“Humans inherently like and understand pictorial narratives,” Lomberg told me. This led to options which included the classic stick figure, which can be traced back to prehistoric cave paintings, being a viable option, though not without concern when considering its place in a narrative and how humans read it. The stick figure, notes Lomberg, “is something everybody recognizes as the human shape, by nature.”

In addition to working without budgetary restraints, the teams relied on two additional pieces of information to develop their proposal. The first was to assume the people who may stumble upon the site have the same cognitive reasoning as humans do today. The second was to consider 10,000 years as an arbitrary goalpost. The radioactive materials will still be radioactive after 10,000 years, so this benchmark simply offered them an initial bar to reach. 

The group also eliminated a few other ideas, including anything non-structural. This included concepts such as a warning sound echoing throughout the area. But they considered structural concepts—including a few controversial ones which made it into the completed proposal—such as modifying the physical landscape, lining the desert fields with large stone spikes, and attempting to convey dread or danger in a way which didn’t require language or pictographs. 

An ongoing debate for the ages

The biggest concern with these ideas was whether people would accurately interpret the messages as intended (with a sense of dread or danger), or would find them intriguing—stirring their desire to explore and triggering the adverse effect.

“I didn’t want the design to be mistaken as an art project,” Lomberg said. “I look at things like signs in national parks. You see information signs overlooking great landscapes, and you never think that the sign is lying to you. It’s there to do a job and no one misinterprets it.”

Designing these markers meant examining multiple options for their physical shape, as well. Laying out a number of above-ground markers in a circle, giving shape to the location, seemed viable, and was another option which made it into the proposal. Such markers would contain pictographs and possibly danger warnings in multiple languages. 

They also considered a below ground alternative; layering the area with buried platforms at various depths. This may deter people from digging; afterall, the danger is hidden until brought to the surface.

Ultimately, the proposal conceptualized by minds like Jon Lomberg remains just that—a proposal. While there is no need for such warning markers to exist while the WIPP is still operational, it’s possible the coming decades will see their implementation. Until then, we can allow our minds to wonder about the human who will stumble upon this location in the year 12,023. And after that point, says Lomberg, “we simply have to say, it’s somebody else’s problem.”

The post The Challenge of Designing Nuclear Waste Warning Markers to Last 10,000 Years appeared first on Nightingale.

Monroe N. Work was an African American sociologist, scholar, and researcher who spent his life collecting information and helping others to understand it. The highlight of his career, according to Work, was the nine editions of the Negro Year Book between 1912 and 1938. Each edition was an encyclopedic collection of yearly facts and data that covered many aspects of African American life as compiled by Work from data submitted from the wider community. Each subsequent edition quickly became the essential source of Black data in the United States and was reported on widely by the White and Black press and used as a resource equally in many schools in America and abroad. 

But their author, Monroe N. Work, remains far less known than his contemporaries W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington despite collaborating directly with both leaders. After sharing research with Du Bois early in his career, Work had the opportunity to start the Department of Records and Research at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, which was presided over by Booker T. Washington. 

This positioned him at the intersection of Black leadership and education in the US for most of his life, to which Monroe Work threw himself into the task of expanding public consciousness through data. In order to drive the importance of certain datasets, the Negro Year Book went a step further by featuring a number of hand-drawn charts focusing on education, healthcare, and mortality. 

Collecting data may not be the calling for the most extroverted people, and this certainly was the case with Monroe Work. He was a soft-spoken, hard-working, and tenacious collector of facts whose dedication to data provided generations of scholars with the empirical ammunition to fight for equality and justice.

Find all editions of the Negro Year Book, plus my full research documentation in this public folder.

The road to Tuskegee

Born to formerly enslaved parents, Work had a protracted education (he didn’t get to attend high school until the age of 23) which eventually brought him to enroll at the University of Chicago to become a sociologist. After graduating in 1903, Work moved to Savannah, Georgia to work at Georgia State Industrial College, which offered a small salary but gave him access to a vibrant Black community and a start for his research.  

Moving to Savannah provided Work proximity to W.E.B. Du Bois in Atlanta, who welcomed him into a long-standing collaboration as a fellow Black scholar. After publishing several articles in Du Bois’s journal at Atlanta University, Du Bois personally invited Work to the initial meeting of the Niagara Movement conference in 1905 as a member of the “Committee on Crime, Rescue, and Reform” as well as the “Committee on Interstate Conditions and Needs.” 

Savannah, Georgia was a charged social environment and Work flourished as a key member of Black society. He established the Savannah Men’s Sunday Club with over 300 members and featured speakers (including Du Bois, Robert E. Park, and others) sharing new ideas on education, healthcare, crime, housing, and other factors inhibiting social equity—topics known collectively at the time as the “Race Problem.” This gave Work a platform to mature professionally and share a number of important papers on health and crime, as well as his early research on African languages. Savannah was also where Work met his wife of 41 years, Florence Evelyn Hendrickson.

He quickly became professionally respected as a fastidious keeper of the facts and his activism-through-research caught the eye of Booker T. Washington, a skilled and charismatic orator, fund-raiser, and president of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (later University) in Alabama that pioneered industrial, agricultural, and higher-education for African Americans. Washington at first contacted Du Bois to start a history department at Tuskegee, but when he declined, Work was contacted to consider the post. The decision to move to Tuskegee seemed like an easy decision, here’s what Work—and his wife Florence—had to say about it:

After arriving in Alabama, Work created the “Plan for Making Tuskegee a Greater Center for Information Relating to the Negro,” which mapped out a system for expanding a library as well as a “systematic gathering of data” relating to the Black experience that encompassed both historical and current events.

After publishing his first few papers and pamphlets on behalf of his new department, Booker T. Washington suggested that Work publish a “yearbook of Negro progress” to honor the 50^th anniversary of emancipation in 1913. The first edition of the Negro Year Book was published as a joint effort by Work and Tuskegee in 1912 at a hefty 225 pages. It sold for 25¢ and was mailed for 5¢ more—which is equivalent to $10 today. The first edition sold 5,000 copies quickly, which provided the necessary funds and enthusiasm to triple the page count and print run by the 1914-15 edition.

The first edition of the Negro Year Book in 1912 set the tone for the series by dividing its content into three sections: an overview of African American life (with supporting data) in 1911, an overview of Black Americans in context to the world’s Black population, and a final section documenting the story of enslavement and emancipation. More than anything, the first edition essentially converted the assorted newspaper snippets and assorted data already collected by Work and his team as a first-of-its-kind resource for collective Black memory.

By the 1914 edition, the Negro Year Book also solicited facts about African Americans as part of a campaign to collect information. This took the form of a contest for the “most practical suggestion” with a hefty prize of $50 (roughly $1,500 today). Collecting information was central to Work’s plan for his department, and by this time he had already been receiving newspaper clippings, quotes, and assorted notes from universities and researchers across the country. By turning this into a contest, Work created a real incentive for laypeople to contribute, and in essence, it helped him to crowdsource his archive.

Author Linda McMurry elaborates on his impact in her book Recorder of the Black Experience: A Biography of Monroe Nathan Work:

While the Negro Year Book was, and still is, a valuable asset to the historian and sociologist, its impact was also significant among laymen. The facts it supplied inspired blacks with confidence in their ability to progress and refuted the rumors of black decline that were widespread among whites. The prestige of Tuskegee Institute lent credence to the facts presented in the yearbooks and allowed them to be distributed through white newspapers and to be accepted in both the North and South. There are many mentions of the Negro Year Book in newspapers across the country. A periodical called The Republic even declared, “The Social, legal, financial, and educational contrasts between the American Negro in 1863 and 1913 are by the very dispassion of their telling made miraculous. The book is written for reference use, yet many successive pages read like romance.”

Work himself considered the Negro Year Book as his most significant accomplishment, saying:

The answering of inquiries about the Negro, which came to Tuskegee from all parts of the world, became an important aspect of the work of the Department of Records and Research. I kept the recipes to all questions received. On the basis of these replies there was published in 1912 the first Negro Year Book, a compilation of facts relating to the Negro. Almost immediately the Negro Year Book became a standard reference on all matters pertaining to the race. Its circulation in the course of time became world-wide.

What follows is a series of examples from various editions of the yearbooks. Every edition focused on education, an area that Work was particularly passionate about. (I’ll explore other topics of interest in forthcoming articles.)

Visualizing educational inequality

Work added a series of charts on education in the 1914-15 edition. By the next edition in 1916-17, the education chapter was elaborated to 58 pages and included the most number of charts. While W.E.B Du Bois created remarkable charts for the 1900 Paris Exposition on the same subject, Work focused on the bigger story of American education and the lack of investment in Black children.  

The series of charts begin with “Per Cent Negro Children In School And Out,” which features horizontally stacked bar charts sorted by the percentage of Black children in school, with Oklahoma at the top with about 62% in school and Louisiana at the bottom with about 28%.

What is immediately evident is the humble way the chart is printed. The chart is straightforward and the design is clean despite being hand-drawn. The chart is arranged in three sections—the group at the top being above 50%, then Texas at 50%, and the rest of the states trailing below 50% (all of them Southern).

Work presented the data in this format originally in the 1914-15 edition but then reworked the design over the next 10 years. As you can see below, his first chart was hand-drawn, while the next two versions are printed as rudimentary bar charts. The last two versions include data on White students, but use tick marks to show those out of school. It’s interesting to consider how Work experimented with the design of this chart over time, yet collected the data in the same way from the beginning.

The second chart in the series is as unique as any that shape our field. In my opinion, it is equally as captivating as Florence Nightingale’s rose and as engaging as Du Bois’s spiral:

This is the 1914-15 version of the chart, and the first time it appears in the Negro Year Book. It is hand-drawn, like most of the charts from this edition, but the measured conception of the chart really packs a punch. “Days Of Schooling Per Year If Each Negro Child Of School Age Got His Share” is a unique design that connects Work’s statistical analysis directly to his argument of unequal investment in education. Each five-spotted dice pattern represents a week in school, each dot a school day.  

Work divides the total number of days attended by the number of children of school age to get the per-capita average for each state. It’s a great way to show the scale of the issue in a way that creates empathy and grabs attention. (On a personal note, can you imagine every African American child in Louisiana only being in school for a month and two days per year?)

Work hid the real surprise in a data table that followed the chart. There, he showed the average number of years that it would take a child to complete an elementary course (grades 1-8). By this accounting, it would take an African American person 33 years to get an elementary school education in South Carolina. 

This chart was recreated twice in the following editions. In 1916-17, the chart was typeset instead of hand-drawn:

While it’s interesting to consider how the impact of the hand-drawn versus printed charts cultivates different emotional responses, the data, itself, is equally stirring. While Louisiana and South Carolina are relatively unchanged, Maryland and North Carolina see significant improvement. Texas initially improves between the editions but then stagnates in the subsequent version.

The 1918-19 edition was the last year this chart was included, and it was oriented vertically on the page with more standardized typesetting. The story in the data is effectively the same with the overall trend in the data flattening out. Louisiana and Georgia see modest gains while South Carolina actually drops to 25 days annually, down from 26 days.

By changing the format and design of this chart, the charm is completely gone. The proximity of the dots doesn’t visually align with the idea of a five-spot dice and the numbers are lost on the page. It’s heartbreaking to see this version because it doesn’t live up to the impact of the previous versions. 

It’s uncertain what exactly changed, was this a different printer? Why did the orientation become vertical? Why did they use asterisks instead of dots? Regardless, it’s an interesting exercise in design exploration. It’s clear that Monroe Work could visualize data to make an efficient and compelling argument, but access to funding and technology likely forced him to focus his efforts elsewhere.

The next chart in the series compares investment in White versus Black schools.

The chart is sorted in descending order by White investment and the bars themselves appear to be made from a kind of tape in the printing process. As you’ll see this technique is used across many of Work’s charts and I assume this is due to how the book was printed, likely using an offset lithography process—the standard at the time. 

While the story in the data is clear, the chart could be made more self-evident. As I show in this chart based on the original data, if Work would have removed some of the states where investment was more equitable, then the scale of unequal investment in Black and White schools would be more obvious. But this was not his intention, as Work was interested in presenting as much data as possible to challenge popular opinion and erode misconceptions.

Work’s factual approach furthered his book’s reach significantly by making it less controversial for White publications and schools to cite. The Virginia Vicksburg Herald published a feature article calling the 1915-16 edition “helpful and inspiring almost beyond measure,” while the Denver Star called Work an “Historian who knows his business.” The Colorado Statesman even ran a front-page essay about the overall inspiration of his work concluding with thanks to Work for “this timely message to our people… for the benefit of making them firmer in the cause that concerns them and is of the greatest importance in their lives.” Because Work collected and presented the data without emotion, it gave visibility to the facts at a time when prejudice could easily have omitted them. (See here for my collection of reporting on Work and the Negro Year Book.)

Interestingly enough, the previous edition of the Negro Year Book in 1914-15 featured a novel and very different approach to this data:

I’ve mentioned the humble printing methods of the book mainly because they stand out for their ingenuity despite an obvious lack of resources. The sophistication of the story of Work’s data is nuanced and clever; its hand-made nature appeals to us as dataviz practitioners because we can see the hand behind the analysis.  

This chart is essentially a unit chart of “$” signs struck many times with a typewriter to create a crude icon for “dollar.” These units are arranged in rows with the corresponding amount at the end of each row. We see the values for White and Black schools with the most per capita spent in Washington, DC. For Mississippi, we are left with only 93¢—not even enough for a single icon.

Again, we see Work experimenting with the format of the chart to make a point. One certainly wonders if Work had seen Du Bois’s Paris Exhibition charts, or if he was informed by other charts used in sociology. There are references to additional charts by Work and his department in an exhibition at the Georgia State Fair in 1908 and also in some of his earlier pamphlets. Further research is needed to help them come to light.

While the publication was expanding between the editions—from 228 pages to 488 in just three years—Work emphasized collecting more facts. Following each of Work’s charts is a table of the data. Interestingly, there isn’t a chart on this data on the number of teachers despite the inclusion in the paragraph that introduces the chapter on education. It is fascinating all the same.

In order to highlight access to education, Work focuses the next two charts and a map to explore Illiteracy:

Work shows that African American illiteracy in 1915-16 was clearly connected to age and geography. The data is stark. The depth of illiteracy in the Southern states presages the impending Northward Black Migration for better living conditions.  

The next chart shows the total scale of education by attainment for African Americans. It’s a chart that Work continues to publish even after the rest of the charts fall away in later editions because I believe it shows the urgency of Black scholarship. 

The remaining suite of three charts round out the yearbook’s education chapter and are included and updated from the second edition of 1913-14 through the eighth edition of 1931-32 in similar formats. All are created out of the same “tape” to create the bar charts.

In these charts, Work explains the finance of Black education. These numbers would have signified vast amounts of money at the time. Collecting and quantifying the sum total of Black education in America shows the scale of the inequity in a way that few other metrics can. While the African American population is an ethnic minority in the United States, the data proves how little had been invested at a time when the need for education would have been imperative. By compiling the total costs for all education, then breaking out the funding opportunities available, Work not only points the way for other Black educators to get access to funds (which he lists in detail at the end of the chapter) but also brings his story full circle in detailing the massive investment by African Americans directly into their community schools.

Setting the record (straight)

At the beginning of his career in sociology, at the age of 37, Monroe N. Work began to define what would be his life’s work: “If Sociology has primarily to do with human beings in their associative capabilities, then its primary function is thorough investigation and research, to collect a body of information that will point out, make clear, what these relationships are and what in the present, the now, should be done in order that these relationships may be made more harmonious, more just and proper.”

Work’s collaborator and friend Jessie P. Guzman noted in writing his obituary:

Work biographer Linda McMurry writes, “The principle driving force in Work’s life was neither accommodation nor protest, rather it was an abiding faith in the ‘impact of fact’. His main concern was to obtain the best possible outlet for the fruits of his research.”  A few chapters later, she adds, “With his faith in the impact of fact and his uncharismatic demeanor, Work’s quiet, scholarly presentations were in keeping not only with Tuskegee’s program but also with his own personality… Indeed, throughout his almost 40 years at Tuskegee, Monroe Work was a quiet but insistent voice for change in the institute’s approach to both education and race relations.”

Through a steadfast belief in facts, Monroe N. Work not only established the structure for how data on African Americans was collected, but he also invested his life in presenting it to the world at large. There is much in Work’s life to share; in a follow-up to this story, I’ll present a body of charts that he created to effect dramatic improvements in African American health conditions. 

Special thanks

Monroe Work first came to my attention by Dr. David H Jackson Jr., Provost of North Carolina Central University. It was his guidance to explore the Negro Year Book which has continued my exploration into Black scholarship. I believe that data visualization may have played a significant role for many activists and scholars throughout the beginning of the twentieth century, the civil rights movement among them.

Thanks very much to Emily Barone for editing!

You can find every image from this article as well as all editions of the Negro Year Book here in this public Google folder containing all my research materials:

While Monroe Work is a remembered figure in African American history, his life has not received much documentation. There is only one book about his life and work, Recorder of the Black Experience: A Biography of Monroe Nathan Work by Linda O. McMurry from 1985. Her care and deep empathy for Work’s life does his legacy a great service.

Prior to McMurry’s biography, an accounting of Work’s life was compiled in 1949 as an in-depth obituary by Jessie P. Guzman, who collaborated with Work from 1938-44 when she took over for him after his retirement at the Tuskegee Institute Department of Records and Research.  She went on to compile and edit two subsequent volumes of the Negro Year Book in 1947 and 1952. 

There is also a lengthy article, “You Can’t Argue with Facts: Monroe Nathan Work as Information Officer, Editor, and Bibliographer,” by Mark Tucker published in 1991. While he focuses on an enormous bibliography that Work assembled later in his career, it is a great summation of his work and contains additional research and scholarship.

Additional links

Monroe Work portrait in National portrait gallery: https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_S_NPG.67.28

Site created highlighting Work’s documentation of Lynching: https://plaintalkhistory.com/monroeandflorencework/

Tuskegee archives: http://archive.tuskegee.edu/repository/digital-collection/the-negro-yearbook/

The post Pioneer in Black Data: Monroe N. Work and the Negro Year Book appeared first on Nightingale.

But it turns out that isotype charts were prevalent in US government documents in the 1930s and 1940s. If you look for them, you can find isotypes sprinkled all over the US during this time — they just weren’t made by Otto or Marie Neurath. No, the growth and popularity of pictorial statistics in the USA are thanks to a different under-recognized figure in design history: Dr. Rudolf Modley.

Born in Vienna, Rudolf Modley was involved as a student volunteer in the earliest days of Neurath’s Museum of Society and Economy. After years of service, Modley eventually moved to the USA to serve as Neurath’s proxy at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, but had ideas of his own and began designing isotype charts by himself.

A young man on his own in America, Modley’s life then follows the path of many first-generation immigrants — he saw an opportunity and worked hard to take advantage of it. The rise of the New Deal in the early 1930s saw many government agencies looking to pictorial statistics to visually communicate their plans to an eager American population. Of course, the officials in the US government looked to Rudolf Modley’s company conveniently named “Pictorial Statistics, Inc” to do so.

He worked tirelessly to bring pictorial statistics to the common American as a new method to understand the increasingly scientific world around them. It only makes sense that he took this new form of communication to the biggest mass media at the time: newspapers.

“Makes The Reading of Statistical Information A Pleasure”

Modley’s star was on the rise as a result of his work with the US government. A February 1938 issue of The New Yorker indirectly announced Modley’s plans when they wrote: “He and his staff will take on any sort of research of graphs [with] Telefact, a feature which he is preparing for newspaper syndication.”

Later, in his 1952 book Pictographs and Graphs, Modley writes about charting in newspapers: “Another difficulty in charting for newspapers is the speed with which the charts must be prepared. The research and finished artwork must be done in a day or two, which puts tailor-made charts beyond the reach of many newspapers. For this reason, several methods for making timely charts available in syndicated form have been tried. As early as 1937, Telefact, a graphic syndicate, made its appearance. Its charts dealt with general social and economic subjects, and, during World War II, with information pertaining to the war. Designed to be used over a period of time, they were topical without following the latest news as a newspaper would.”

Telefact was syndicated widely across the USA, and featured in newspapers in Minnesota, South Carolina, Virginia, Arizona, Utah, and many others. As you can see on the left, they were inserted wherever space allowed, and visually competed for the reader’s attention with advertisements and headlines.

In his 1938 article “Pictographs Today and Tomorrow”, Modley says: “… another effort has been made to have pictographs penetrate even into remote areas by means of a syndicated newspaper feature called Telefact, which presents a fact of social or economic importance each day… The pictograph technique opens up new possibilities of influencing and shaping public opinion. It makes possible the presentation of factual material in simple terms and to an audience which is much larger than any yet reached by factual information.”

A Treasure Trove of Charts

There are quite a few Isotype practitioners that have been overlooked but Rudolf Modley is the most known among them with a surprisingly large body of work that is very poorly documented.

Imagine my surprise when searching newspapers.com to find not 2–3 mentions of Telefact, but over a thousand. So far I have manually collected more than 480 charts from daily newspapers with double this amount created from 1938–1945.

The scale of the find is what is so surprising. With so many charts to scan through, we see so many design ideas explored by Modley and his staff. Not only can we see how different subjects are presented using this charting method, but we also can see how the design templates of Isotype have been applied to various types of data.

This laboratory of pictorial statistics feels different from most Isotype examples that we know from books and exhibitions. While many Isotypes are part of a broad study or education focus, Telefacts were designed to be immediate and independent. The concepts that are communicated in Telefacts are naturally interesting but independent of any larger story, acting like bite-sized snippets of economic trivia.

This was exactly the point. It is easy to see Modley’s agenda in the marketing of Telefact as well as in the charts themselves. This project was designed to help people learn the facts — but more than that — to help common people leverage the world of science and statistics in their normal lives.

Of course, Modley was also just as interested as exposing them to Pictorial Statistics as well. He writes in his 1937 book How to Use Pictorial Statistics:

“Numerous textbooks on subjects as varied as history, geography, and biology have been extensively illustrated by pictograph technique. While it is thus assured that the coming generation will be used to the method, another effort has been made to have pictographs penetrate even into remote areas by means of a syndicated newspaper feature called Telefact, which presents a fact of social or economic importance each day.”

How To Present Hundreds of Telefacts Charts When We Can Barely Focus On One?

I found myself wondering what to do with all this content. While I find the charts compelling, I also find the act of scanning through them equally interesting. But I kept wondering how I could help other people have a similar experience? Our dwindling attention span is hard to navigate, so I kept asking myself what was the best way to get this work out into the public and allow them to learn more from it?

I decided to create a Tumblr to share my work for a few reasons. First, Tumblr allows for a very intuitive experience where the user can see the charts as a group and also as individuals. Each image is meta tagged, so these charts will now be searchable among the vast quantity of SEO optimized images on Tumblr. But most importantly, these images will now be indexed by Google, so they will be publically available and accessible.

Please check it out: https://modley-telefact-1939-1945.tumblr.com

Looking At A Few Telefact Charts

There’s a lot to love in these charts. Not only do we see the progenitors of the everyday infographic that we see in our newspapers and magazines today, but also a snapshot of what life was like in the late 30s and into the WW2 era. Let’s take a look at a few interesting charts:

Many charts use standard isotype methods to visually display statistics but also reduce them to a more immediate understanding of the content. This chart uses simplified ‘guide pictures’ to indicate the split between farmers and non-farmers. The chart compares the urban and rural incomes with the corresponding number of children in each.

This telefact chart contains very little text but breaks one of Neurath’s main rules by including the numbers along with the pictorial representation of the number. This is a significant divergence from the Isotype practice, but at the same time adds a significant layer of meaning needed to communicate to a general audience. The basic numbers presented are simple and give substance to the charts.

As for the chart, it is interesting to see just how much water there is in an average egg. The ‘waves’ of water are visually interesting as they are used in a sort of horizontal stacked bar-chart, with the solid, non-water segment showing the rest of the percentage. The use of the wave to denote water is an interesting exercise in symbol abstraction, as the quantity of water in a stick of butter does not map to our understanding of an ocean. Somehow it still works.

Of note is that each Telefact has the month and day included in the right corner to show exactly when it was to be published. Unfortunately, they do not include the year.

The ‘unit arrow’ diagram on the left is another isotype chart type popularized by the Neurath’s and was used throughout their careers. It’s clear that Modley regularly kept a close eye on their work and, for better or worse, continued to build on their ideas.

In the chart on the left, each arrow represents the millions of dollars in exports and easily shows exactly where the US sells its goods. In order to squeeze so much information into such a small area, Modley creates a massive simplification of the map shapes in a semi-geometric fashion. Modley experiments with this kind of geometric simplification throughout this period of his work.

Otto and Marie Neurath occasionally used the power of analogy to focus the audience to consider data in a certain way as best used in the chart “Only an Ocean In Between”. In the chart on the upper right, however, Modley uses a similar idea to compare the wind velocity for five major cities as the distance it takes to blow the leaves off a tree. The power of analogy is particularly very strong, and while Modley didn’t use this technique often, it is especially powerful in the right context.

In terms of subject matter, Modley knew salacious subjects would help to attract attention. This chart of fatal accidents — complete with almost 30 little dead guys — used repetition to grab attention and a basic title to seal the deal.

In the end, this is ultimately a conventional pictograph, with little Isotype influence. That’s not inherently a bad thing, as an overview of the hundreds of Telefacts shows a huge quantity of these types of pictographs interspersed between more complex charts and diagrams.

Pictographs are easy to understand and require less visual sophistication by the audience. By using so many basic pictographs it shows a willingness by Modley and his team to focus on the data and not over-do it. Certainly creating these charts each week/day was a huge amount of work, so standardizing the process for creating the charts was just as important as knowing when to move on to the next one.

This map is again very much in the mode of what you’d see created by the Isotype team. The chart’s learning objective is to compare population density with recreational areas. While well-intentioned, it is unfortunately not a very successful chart as it is too crowded and not well labeled.

In collecting so many Telefact charts it also becomes an important opportunity to learn from Modley’s failures. Understanding when a chart is successful, and when it is not, helps us understand how to bring these ideas into our own practice. In the chart above, Modley tried to cram too much into too small an area creating a messy design that is hard to visually read.

I’d invite everyone to interrogate the design of each of these charts for the same purpose of learning what works and what does not.

We can also study these charts to see exactly how Modley’s efforts began to diverge their Isotype origins. Both charts above are quite different from what the Neuraths were designing yet are still sophisticated designs.

The chart on the left, “How Many People One Farmer’s Work Feeds”, speaks about the benefits of modernization and mechanization, the changes in American culture over a century, and hints at the role of agriculture in international trade. On the bottom row, Modley literally draws a blank as to what the future holds. This is a provocation; not a projection into the future, but a dare to the audience to learn more in order to shape it. By crafting a design that focuses on the possibilities, it departs from the normal isotype objective of illustrating the statistical ‘known’.

The “S” design of the chart on the right is typical of some other charts that Modley invented. It was created as a way to display a process happening over time but visually compressed into a small space. Modley uses a similar design in a book called the “New York Primer” which came out the year before, so it is a design concept he was exploring at the time.

Exploring these design concepts is important as it shows that contemporary information designers can (and should!) continue to explore new design patterns based on Isotype to further their communication needs. Rudolf Modley’s team was constantly experimenting, just as his earlier text has said, by “open[ing] up new possibilities of influencing and shaping public opinion.” This also proves that Modley wasn’t “merely” an imitator, but a practitioner on his own merit.

These two Telefacts also show how Modley was experimenting with graphic design concepts as well. The chart to the top left, “Salaries Above $300,000” rides the line between data visualization and design sloganeering. It shows another reoccurring subject of Telefact charts, the breakdown of jobs in Hollywood. The chart’s label assuming a graphic that drives the appeal of the whole design.

“For Every Job 500 Applicants” to the top right shows an entirely different illustration of a 1-out-of-500 statistic. Each dot is a person that is restrained behind a barrier while a solitary silhouette strolls up to the studio entrance. Black is used to grab the audience’s eye while a sort of isometric view provides the compositional structure.

Both of these Telefacts would easily attract attention in a crowded newspaper layout. By studying these works we see other ideas in exploring the aesthetic possibilities in Isotype designs, opening us to the possibilities beyond Neurath, Arntz, and Modley.

The Importance of World War II to Telefact

WWII was extremely important for the Telefact series as quoted by Modley at the beginning of this article. The war provided loads of information that would have been very interesting to Americans. Modley’s Telefact charts were there to explain details of the mechanisms and fighting techniques; feeding a public hungry for news of loved ones serving in the war.

While many Telefacts were still providing pictorial statistics, diagrams helped to decode the complexity of the new technology of war as well as help explain how Americans could contribute in their own ways. Certainly, we see a rise in cross-section diagrams that help explain the components of everything from bombs to bombers, and houses to air-raid shelters. The diagrams spanned a variety of styles, likely created by different artists on Modley’s team.

What’s interesting is that this move to diagrammatic information design occurs before Marrie Neurath’s books for children. It’s interesting to consider that both designers began a more illustrational approach to designing information, rather than just statistics, after the war. While Marie Neurath certainly had much more of a focus on creating charts and illustrations for books after her emigration to England in 1941, the Isotype team had a split focus on exhibition design and institutional education during the 1930s. Otto Neurath’s focus on ‘learning through the eye’ was certainly a reality by the post-war period, with many primary books lavishly illustrated by the time. Perhaps the importance of statistical education took a more general back seat to more qualitative information design as the world refocused on an optimistic future.

The Grunge of News: Aesthetics & Business

I also want to take a moment to celebrate the beauty of the grungy ‘realness’ of newsprint. Cheap paper, bad lithographs, ink slip, punctured and torn paper, and plain old dirt are all present in these reproductions.

The process of creating syndicated news graphics would have been purely physical at the time. Images would have been drawn by hand or reproduced photographically. The text might have been set by hand or optically produced likely about 4x larger than printed. The reproductions would have been mailed weekly to papers around the country allowing each to then prepare for local printing. It is all gloriously messy, made even more so by the digitization process of scanning, adjusting for contrast, and sharpening the rough edges of the not-so-sharp image.

We could also consider the Telefact a kind of “science comic” as the method of creation and distribution would have largely been the same for both. Telefacts were distributed by Science Service, a newspaper syndicate begun by two journalists dedicated to “pioneering the dissemination of accurate, accessible, and engaging news of science to the public primarily through the mainstream media through its syndicate service.” We can easily consider Telefact to be their version of the funny papers.

Modley was sincere in his quest to get pictorial statistics into modern practice, and in 1943 he published his first collection of over 1,000 icons. The book Pictorial Symbols collected his pre-made icons as seen throughout the Telefact series in order to equip those who wanted to make their own charts. Prices for charts, icons, and custom icons were very reasonable, with your custom selection of icons priced at $.05 cents for the first 50 icons, then $.01 cent each after that (50 icons would cost the equivalent of $30 USD today)

Turning the book Pictorial Symbols over reveals a full-page ad for Telefact on the back cover. Nested at the bottom is the announcement of the acquisition of the Telefact series by McClure Newspaper Syndicate, which ultimately spelled the beginning of the end.

McClure Newspaper Syndicate would have been one of the largest companies in the business, distributing 10,000 features with combined sales of $100 million a year. Lasting more than a century in business, McClure was one of the biggest distributors of comics, bringing everything from Rube Goldberg to Batman and Robin to thousands of papers every day. That kind of reach, with those kinds of resources, would have been attractive to Modely. While it is clear that Modley and his team continued their involvement with the series for at least two more years, we see less pictorial statistics and more traditional charts begin to appear in the series in 1945.

For those familiar with Isotype, the chart at the above right, “Expected Cut In War Production Program,” would have literally been the antithesis of Neurath’s teachings. The very invention of the Isotype concept was in opposition to the scaling of icons to show their quantity. It’s clear that by this point Modley was likely not present in the creation of the Telefact series as he would never have supported such a chart. That same chart also illustrates the end of the war, which ended up being a significant complication as well.

The syndication of newspaper content had been booming since the turn of the century, but as the war began its last year, many newspapers cut back their pages to contribute towards war rations. After the war, the rise of televisions provided a new challenge that reduced newspaper sales further. In my research, I could not find any Telefact charts after 1945.

Rudolf Modley continued to work in pictorial statistics for many years afterward. He published a number of books about graphic communication and also collaborated with historians to explain American and European economic history.

Communication With All People Everywhere

As the post-War world embraced multi-national collaboration and standardization, Modley found himself collaborating with celebrity cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead. Their 1968 essay Communication Among All People Everywhere in Natural History Magazine outlines their shared interest in cataloging all manner of icons and methods of visual communication as an emerging Lingua franca.

As Modley had been documenting icons for decades already, another famous designer, Henry Dreyfuss, also sought his assistance in compiling icons for a similar project. In an act of cosmic completeness, in the late 1950s, Modley enlisted Marie Neurath to help collect a wide survey of icons from many industries. The two collaborated for years sending icons and letters discussing their work. Dreyfuss published his Symbol Sourcebook: An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols in 1972 to widespread acclaim. It’s an incredible book, unique in many ways, and includes an introduction by Buckminster Fuller, as well as a 2-page spread introducing Isotype written by Marie Neurath.

Collecting icons must have fulfilled Modley, who continued to work on his own Handbook of Pictorial Symbols right up until his death in 1976. The earlier collection in his Pictorial Symbols book from 1942 was expanded with the help of Gerd Arntz and extended to include over 3,250 wayfinding and Olympic icons. It’s an awesome resource issued by the low-cost Dover Publications (which is still readily available used for under $5).

The book begins with an essay by Modley called “Introduction to Graphic Symbols”. It seems only fitting to finish this essay by noting the reverence he held for Otto Neurath as evidenced in his writing. There it is, right on the first page, “The modern techniques of graphic presentation of facts and figures were developed by Otto Neurath in the early 1920s in Vienna. If you learn these techniques, you too can use graphic symbols to set forth complex facts in simplified, more easily understood and more easily remembered form.”

Modley, at the end of his life, performs the ultimate pivot, from Otto Neurath to you. Practicing this kind of isotype/pictorial statistics was just as possible then as it is today. Rudolf Modley’s mission as pictorial statistics teacher and Neurath evangelist rings true to the very end.

There are so many examples of isotype and pictorial statistics to take inspiration from. What better place to start your learning journey than by scanning through several hundred Telefact charts?

Go find them at: https://modley-telefact-1939-1945.tumblr.com

Thanks as always to: Georges Hattab, Alyssa Bell, and  RJ Andrews for their editorial help and support.

Several of the essays cited in the above article have also been recovered from original sources:

Pictographs Today and Tomorrow, Rudolf Modley, Public Opinion Quarterly, 1938

Communication Among All People Everywhere, Margaret Meade and Rudolf Modley, Nature Magazine, 1968

Handbook of Pictorial Symbols introduction, Rudolf Modley, 1976

The author is especially indebted to the work of Hisayasu Ihara for their pioneering research on Rudolf Modley. If you are interested, I’d urge you to read more:

Rigor and Relevance in the International Picture Language, Rudolf Modley’s Criticism against Otto Neurath and his Activity in the Context of the Rise of the “Americanization of Neurath method”, Hisayasu Ihara, 2009

This article comes as part of a series on Isotype and derives mainly from research on the Isotype design process created by Otto and Marie Neurath with Gerd Arntz. My goal is to teach people about the techniques and mindset of this data-driven design team, in order to inspire new information design concepts today.

The post The Telefacts of Life: Rudolf Modley’s Isotypes in American Newspapers 1938–1945 appeared first on Nightingale.

It was at this point that Facebook popped up an advert for Frederica Fragapane’s Domestika course. “Learn Data Visualisation Design” it proclaimed, the title accompanied by a picture of her visualisation of Artists and Music Groups for Visual Data, and something about the image really caught my eye.  I have never really considered myself an artistic person – frankly, I’d be lucky to manage a well-proportioned stick person!  I’ve experimented with more mathematical arts and crafts of various sorts; I’ve played instruments, but never got the hang of composing my own music, and I’ve dabbled in crochet, where I’ll usually start with a pattern then go off-piste, occasionally achieving the desired effect. However I’m quite a practical person, pretty good at a bit of DIY carpentry or plumbing, have always loved good design, and I do consider myself creative in the problem-solving sense. I have often wanted to find more artistic expressions for that creativity, and something about that beautiful graph really piqued my interest. I wanted to know more, and signed up for the course without hesitation.

If you’re looking for a good introduction to data visualisation, this short online course is a great place to start. I found myself entranced by the combination of mathematical precision and artistic creativity which unfolded as the course videos progressed. I’ve worked a fair bit in science communication and put together the occasional chart or graph to make a point. On that level I was aware of the advantages of visualising data, but I had simply never considered applying a more artistic approach to colours and shapes, or that the beauty of the final image could be as much a valid aim as accuracy and clarity, being used as a tool to draw the viewer in to the story behind the image the way that I had been drawn into the course. Watching Frederika’s process unfold, I was struck by the deceptive simplicity of what she was doing. She clearly has great skill with colour choices and design elements that I lack, but at the heart of what she was doing was something that made me think …maybe I could do that….

That was the spark which inspired a steep learning curve, not only about data visualisation as an art form, but also about the tools of the trade. I experimented with RawGraph and Adobe Illustrator, which were both touched on in the course, but were not programmes I’d ever used before, then set off in search of a dataset to work with. I settled on the story of the Soviet Space Dogs. I’ve been inspired by space, science, and science fiction all my life, and I am also a huge dog lover, so the idea of telling this story visually really resonated with me.

Like many space enthusiasts I know the sad story of Laika, the most famous space dog and first animal to orbit the earth, who tragically died in orbit. But I knew little of the other dogs which were part of the Soviet space program, and I wanted to tell all of their stories. I found a book on the subject that had done the hard work of collecting the data, the aptly named Soviet Space Dogs by Olesya Turkina, as well as a previous data visualisation based on the book by Duncan Geere. I supplemented this data with some additional online sources, then set about turning this information into something I hoped would be both beautiful and informative. During my preparation for the Astronaut selection interviews I had read an article about how putting boundaries on a problem can really help the creative problem solving process. I particularly enjoyed this aspect of visualising the data – not an unbounded artistic question of “what should I draw?”, rather a bounded exercise of “how can I display this data clearly, yet beautifully?”   

Looking for more inspiration I found a second Domestika course by Sonja Kuijpers. One thing I appreciated greatly about both courses was that the artists talked openly about where they get their ideas, and how they pull together various visual influences, whether from the natural world or related to the data they were working on. I realised that I could do the same. I think the strong influence of that first image of Frederika’s that I saw is pretty obvious when you compare it to my final visualisation, but from Sonja’s course I got the idea to use visual elements from the book that the data came from, which inspired the colour palette and various shapes used.

While researching this project I learned a great deal more about the lives of the space dogs than I could ever fit into a single visualisation image. For example, the reason Laika’s flight had no recovery mechanism, meaning she was always fated to die during her mission, was due to political pressure to get the mission ready in a hurry so it would coincide with the 40^th anniversary of the Bolshovik Revolution. While I couldn’t include all the details from the book, I picked out some key facts and have incorporated those in words alongside the main data, to add more depth to the story it tells.  My interest in the space industry meant I have learned a little Russian over the years, and as the dogs’ names were given in the original Cyrillic in the book, I decided to make the project dual-language, since this data may be of particular interest to Russian speakers. 

As invitations to the next round of the Astronaut selection process were being received by my fellow candidates, and it was becoming clearer and clearer that I was almost certainly now just waiting for a formal rejection, it helped more than I can say to have a project that I loved to pour my energy into. I have ADHD, and if you know anything about the condition, you may have heard of “hyperfocus,” a particularly intense state of concentration which this project certainly tapped into for me. By the time the ESA rejection email finally arrived in my inbox, my spare time was being completely consumed by “Space Dogs,” as the project affectionately became known in my household, and I was utterly absorbed in the data visualisation process, which certainly helped cushion the blow. Becoming an astronaut is a pretty long shot and on one level I didn’t ever expect to be selected, but nonetheless it was sad to receive that news, especially at an age where I’m unlikely to get another opportunity to apply, and the company of Laika and her fellow canine cosmonauts kept my mind from dwelling too much on what might have been.

Data visualisation is a hobby I have quickly grown to love, and describe to my friends as art for those of us who can’t draw, but love a good spreadsheet.  I wrote this article while setting up for my first ever art show  – not something I ever imagined I would be doing – in Chicago, at the 80th World Science Fiction Convention, and was delighted to sell out of the prints I took with me.  I am selling prints of my art for charity, and for the Soviet Space Dogs project it seemed appropriate to find a charity supporting dogs in Ukraine.  I chose Shelter Friend, who have been sharing heart-wrenching stories of dogs in need of help, and I’m pleased to be in a position to be able to donate all profits from this project, including the $350 raised at the Worldcon, to Shelter Friend. It was lovely to get the opportunity to talk to people in person at the art show about the project, and to see the different responses to it, the most common of which was that most people had no idea just how many dogs were involved in the Soviet space programme, or that so many of them actually survived.  I was also excited to be featured in a podcast about Modern Art, Three Minute Modernist, hosted by Christopher J Garcia, who saw the piece at the convention and was very complimentary about it.

My second project had a much faster turn-around time than the first, as I was given a one-week deadline for a piece for a fanzine about the Star Wars film, Rogue One.  I’m a huge Star Wars fan and re-watched the film for inspiration. I was reminded of just how much fuss was made in some corners of the internet over the lead character being female when the film was released, despite there actually being very few women in it overall, which seemed like a topic ripe for visualisation.  I found a dataset gathered by data scientist and journalist-engineer Amber Thomas, who had previously done her own visualisation, which can be seen on her blog, which I combined with additional information from IMDB. Having become more familiar with Illustrator, I was able to pull together something which I feel conveys the main point about the scarcity of women in the Star Wars universe in a visually pleasing way in a fairly short time frame, which appeared in Issue 65 of Hugo Award-winning fanzine, Journey Planet.

I’m already thinking about my next project – I generally learn best by doing so I will be starting another project soon. Whatever I settle on, I’m looking forward to learning more about the theory and practice of data visualisation in all its forms and developing additional skills with which to explore this newfound passion.  I am also excited by the idea of branching out of digital art to explore other, more physical mediums. Those carpentry and crochet skills may come in useful yet…

To see the full details of my completed projects check out my website, and to keep up to date with my next data visualisation adventure you can follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or tumblr, @phoenixdataart.

Additional images:

The post Discovering Data Visualisation: How I Discovered and Fell in Love with Data Visualisation Art appeared first on Nightingale.

The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) was the first women’s major league, and thus far the only women’s major baseball league, predating Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 by nearly 30 years. Title IX marks its 50th anniversary this year, and with Amazon Prime releasing a new series inspired by the Penny Marshall film A League of Their Own this August, I wanted to see if it was possible to make the league’s statistics come alive visually.

During World War II, Major League Baseball shut down as players answered the military’s call for the defense of democracy, and fuel rationing made any sort of road trip far more difficult than before the war. While women could not at the time serve in combat roles, they took mens’ places in factory floors, and on the field. As Anika Orrock shows in her brilliantly written and illustrated book, The Incredible Women of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, the AAGPBL held its first tryouts at Wrigley Field in spring 1943. It stood up four teams that began play that summer: the Racine, Wisconsin Belles; Rockford, Illinois Peaches; the Kenosha, Wisconsin Comets; and the South Bend, Indiana Blue Sox. It played for 12 seasons between 1943 and 1954 and expanded to ten teams, before shrinking again to five teams by its end.

As ahead of its time as it was, the league was rooted in the gender roles of the 1940s. Players were chaperoned and received tutoring in makeup, body carriage, and decorum from Helena Rubenstein’s cosmetics company. They wore dresses–not trousers or jeans–when out in public and their game uniforms were above-the-knee skirts, which were far from ideal for sliding on the basepaths. 

Baseball is relatively unique in the way that it embraces statistics to an even greater degree than other major spectator sports (although other sports like hockey and American football have become more stats-oriented in recent years). I’m a member of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), a global organization of baseball fans that conducts historical and quantitative research using historical statistics and biomechanical data, so baseball statistics are something that I think about quite often.

The emerging practice of data visualization hasn’t yet been widely adopted in the baseball research community. While there is very much a tradition of analytics that is deeply rooted in the history of the game, stats have been presented in the same way for decades. The most visible element of baseball statistics – the bubblegum card – has included a simple spreadsheet on the back of the card containing a player’s career statistics which has not changed significantly, in format or content, in more than 70 years. Now, though, is a unique opportunity to expand the use of data visualization, as media become ever more visual and the sport seeks to attract new fans.

Coupled with an emerging environment in the U.S. supporting equal access, spanning beyond race and gender, now is a great time to take a new look at the AAGBPL and to visualize its players’ notable accomplishments. 

The Analytical Process

AAGPBL data presented an interesting challenge. While the league has an active alumni association featuring individual player records, online data services like Stathead have yet to integrate the full set of records. The best resource for league data is a hard copy record book first published in 2000 by W.C. Madden, and compiled from a mix of league records, newspaper accounts, and other contemporary sources.

Madden’s work has inspired some valuable research over the years; for example, Kriss Barnhart examined the relationship between the league’s rule changes, including the size of the ball and the length of the base paths, and player performance.

Making sense of 12 years of data

The greatest challenge for this analysis was constructing a workable data set using the available figures from Madden’s record book. Madden notes that for the first half of its life (1943 to 1948), the league kept accurate individual records, but from 1949 onwards league-wide records became more of a challenge and by 1951, the central league office had been disbanded. 

Madden has compiled an authoritative record, but as with any publication, there are a few misprints or mathematical errors, and I needed to do a significant amount of work–about 40 hours worth–to enter, clean and correct the data. (There was unfortunately no substitute for the tedious task of manually keying in the data, checking every line in the book to make sure that I didn’t miss anything.) While I chose Tableau Public to build the visualization, I created my database in Google Sheets, which I linked to my Tableau workbook. I built two worksheets, one for pitching statistics and another for batting statistics. 

This results in a simple database that still enables time-series analysis by year and player, in order to track the overall evolution of the league. Also, some assumptions had to be made for certain statistics, like on base percentage (OBP), which traditionally includes all the ways that a player can reach base, including on a fielder’s error, but which are not recorded measures in Madden’s record book.

The database is in two separate files: one for batting and another for pitching. Each contains twelve separate sheets, one for each season. In addition to the figures that Madden collected, I calculated five sets of statistics that have become popular in more recent decades. For batters, these include on-base percentage (the percentage of the time that a batter gets on base, whether by getting a hit or reaching base on four pitches out of the strike zone); slugging percentage (a weighted average of singles, doubles, triples, and home runs); and on-base percentage plus slugging percentage; and for pitchers, the ratio between strikeouts (good for a pitcher) and walks (not good for a pitcher) and walks and hits per inning pitched (WHIP). 

The two files are combined in a union, based on the player name and year field, so that the visualization can include both sets of statistics. This is important because in the 1940s and 1950s, pitchers still hit in the batting order instead of a designated hitter, which has been the case since 1973.

Database construction In Tableau

Creating a union for the tables allows them to function as a single table, which makes year-to-year comparisons much easier.

And now, at long last, the data are ready to visualize. The game is so complex, with so many statistical measures collected, that showing them comprehensively on a chart is next to impossible. So these visualizations show statistics that are especially relevant or insightful for the performance of the league.

Scatterplots and sparklines: insights for a unique league

The first chart is an overview of key batting and pitching statistics. Each of these is shown by a simple line graph, with no labels on either axis (called sparklines) and linked to the two matrices in the middle, one plotting batting average against OPS and the other showing ERA against K/BB for pitching. Each dot denotes a player’s season statistics, with the size of the dot related to the number of plate appearances and the color of the dot based on the year. By clicking or hovering on each dot in the visualization, a viewer can find the statistics for a particular player, or move from dot to dot to compare players.

One important note for the charts on this page is that in baseball–as in many fields–there are certain measures that show a positive outcome with a low measure – like earned run average and WHIP for pitchers. For those measures, the axes featuring these measures are reversed so that the best outcomes are shown in the upper right-hand corner of the large matrix–as they usually are–and in the sparklines, where improvement is shown by upward movement along the y axis.

The sparklines reveal the most interesting insight about the AAGPBL: the steady increase in offense–measured by hits, home runs, and OPS–and the corresponding decrease in pitching performance, especially ERA and WHIP. These are average measures across the entire league and don’t reflect individual performances as much as they do the changing dynamics of a league that began using underhand pitching, a ball the size of a softball, and bases 40 feet apart to a sport that was much more like the men’s major leagues, with a ball the size of a baseball, overhand pitching, and bases 55 feet apart.

The second chart, “Key Ranges by Season,” shows how typical performance changed during the life of the league, both for batters and pitchers.

Ranges

This chart shows the same six measures as in the first chart: batting average, hits, and home runs for batting; and WHIP, IP, and wins for pitching. While the sparklines show the average trend, this graphic shows the spread: the median, quartiles, and upper and lower limit for each year. Interestingly, the range for the batting measures (especially for home runs, and especially during the last five years of the league) increased, while for innings pitched and strikeout/walk ratio, both ranges decreased for the last eight years of the league.

The third chart, “Four AAGPBL Luminaries,” is the most accessible for someone new to baseball and to the AAGPBL in particular: a survey of players highlighting four, in particular, that the audience can learn more about on their own. This is where the true power of data visualization lies: not merely in revealing facts, but in empowering audiences to discover facts that are especially relevant for them.

Tree diagrams

This chart uses tree diagrams that go from “hot”–the career leaders in each of the four categories – to “cool” (the bottom part of the top 20–roughly–in each category. The four luminaries include:

• Career home run leader Eleanor Callow (55)
• Season batting average leader Joanne Weaver, who hit .429–higher than the marks that Ted Williams (.406) and Rogers Hornsby (.424) set–at the age of 19
• Career wins leader Helen Nicol (163)
• Career hits leader Dorothy Kamenshek (1,085)

I have only scratched the surface of the accomplishments of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, but this brief look at the data highlights a few intriguing insights about the league, both in hitting and pitching, that are worth exploring more deeply. Ultimately, the power of data visualization is creating new ways of seeing data–whether this year’s Major League statistics or the entire lifetime of a professional league such as the AAGPBL. Even though few AAGPBL players remain living, their accomplishments, recorded for posterity and able to tell stories of their own, live on. The best thing that the reader can do to follow up on reading this article is to interact with the visualizations themselves by visiting the Tableau Public dashboard. In the end, the value of data visualization for baseball is the same as it is in any other field: to create a new way of seeing data that are otherwise contained in reams of spreadsheet columns. 

The post Insights Of Their Own: Visualizing Women’s Baseball appeared first on Nightingale.

Inspiration 

The W.E.B. Du Bois Portrait Gallery began as an attempt to participate in the 2022 #DuBoisChallenge. However, not long after I started working on it, it quickly became a broader exploration into W.E.B Du Bois and the incredible legacy left behind in his data visualization work. As a black man, I found that Du Bois’ depiction of the black experience post-slavery allowed me to explore that time in our history and see how it impacted us back then and even today. This was probably the most valuable part of this process for me. 

The Du Bois Challenge

The Du Bois Challenge hosted by Anthony (AJ) Starks, Allen Hillery, and Sekou Tyler provides a platform for people to engage with and re-create Du Bois visualizations and share their work online. AJ wrote an excellent piece about this challenge, and I recommend you check it out here.

As an avid explorer in data viz, I was blown away by AJ’s gallery of Du Bois’ portraits. This year’s challenge provided ten portraits for us to recreate over time, but after attempting the first, I became curious about the second, the third, and the fourth. I realized I wouldn’t be staying within the limits of the challenge, but the work had already evolved into a personal journey for me.

Most of the visualizations I was re-creating were part of the American Negro exhibit from the 1900s. In my opinion, Du Bois was way ahead of the times in terms of data visualization. 

Gallery Style Viz and Choosing the Gallery Portraits

I always knew I wanted to make multiple vizzes. My initial plan was to gradually release them over the timeline of the #DuBoisChallenge. However, as I spent time creating the vizzes and researching Du Bois, I encountered this gallery by North Carolina State University, which also features some of Du Bois’ portraits. After seeing that, I scrapped my idea of releasing multiple individual vizzes and decided instead to emulate their gallery-style layout. The convenience I experienced while interacting with the NC State gallery was something I wanted to offer to my audience. 

From that point, it was simply a matter of choosing which vizzes to include in the gallery. There wasn’t any fancy selection process. I chose vizzes that intrigued me and were diverse in topic. In depicting the black experience, Du Bois charted population growth in the black community, the value of property/wealth, the journey to freedom after slavery, and more. My goal was to touch on as many of these topics as possible. 

Processes, Tools, and Techniques 

As many practitioners know, a big part of any data viz project is collecting data and gathering relevant information resources. AJ had already collected all the data and original portraits and made them available in his Github profile. This saved me a lot of time, and I’m grateful to him as it let me focus on the exploration. 

The Du Bois Challenge features many entries made in R, Python, Power BI, and other tools, but not many Tableau entries. This was one of the main reasons that it felt great to represent Tableau this year. Specifically, I used Tableau to put together the charts; the second tool I used was Adobe Illustrator. As a fan of design, learning design tools has allowed me to take some of my visualizations to the next level, and it was only natural to incorporate one here. I used Illustrator for design aspects like the background/gallery layout and other minor things like annotations and making the shapes used in some visualizations.

Timeline and Challenges Faced 

The time taken for each viz varied so much. Many of the bar charts and basic charts took 10-15 minutes, while others took much longer. Overall, I found the vizzes with many “hand-drawn” components and annotations took a lot longer because of the level of detail. 

Here are some examples: 

The easy stuff:

Stuff that took a bit more time:

From a dataviz perspective, some of those that took longer are simple in theory. For example, the viz on the left is a simple line chart, but the axes, annotations, etc., required building and bringing a lot of components into Tableau. Same with the one on the right—it’s a basic stacked bar chart, but the details required a lot of time. As a matter of fact, despite being very detailed, the re-creation on the right is still missing a few details from the original:

While the lines connecting the bars were a great addition to the original viz, I felt they didn’t provide much extra value to the chart. And honestly, I couldn’t find a practical way to add them, so I excluded them.  

I made decisions like this throughout the visualization process, and they emphasized a certain aspect of Du Bois’ visualizations that stood out to me: the illusive simplicity of many of the Du Bois portraits.

There were many times where it was shocking to me how much effort it took to make some of the simpler-looking vizzes. I think we can attribute this to the particular tool I used—Tableau. I imagine that making some of these charts by hand may actually be easier.

Examples

Continuing with the example based on portrait 4 in my gallery (Plate 21 by Du Bois), here’s what it took:

Two sheets are used for the main view.

16 individual components are required to make the axis.

I created the annotations in Illustrator.

Thinking about it now, I wouldn’t refer to this aspect as a challenge, but more of a necessary exercise in finding creative ways to replicate.

Another aspect that required some thinking was deciding what to preserve from the originals and what to remove. As a fan of minimalism in visualization, I occasionally noticed corrections and omissions that I could make while building. My goal was to do so without compromising the work’s authenticity, while modernizing the look and feel.

Here are some examples:

1. The proportions of the original viz on the right were throwing me off, and I felt the proportions would be easier to compare if all the bars totaled 100%.

2. The original viz on the right has a number of details, like the right arrows at each category and lines connecting the bars. Though great additions, I wanted to modernize and clean up the viz, so I omitted both of these details.

3. This one was an easy decision for me, as it felt like the extra twists in the circle made it harder to compare the values of the proportions. I decided to build mine with no extra twists.

Conclusion

Creating the gallery was an informative process for me, and it was gratifying to see the reception to the viz within the data visualization community. I had an opportunity to present the viz at a Data + Diversity event, where we were able to dig into Du Bois’ history. The viz was also talked about at a Tableau Chicago TUG (Tableau User Group) event. At that point, I thought it was awesome to simply help raise awareness about W.E.B Du Bois and his great work. 

However, in May 2022, during the Tableau Conference, the viz won Favorite Viz of the Year, and I have to admit that wasn’t something I anticipated. On that day, I had the conference playing in the background while I was working from home. When they announced the award, I just about fell out of my chair in shock. After being a part of the #datafam for a while and having been shown so much love already, I was floored and grateful that they had voted this viz as their favorite. I still have a lot of “thank you’s” in the tank, so here’s one more big thank you! to everyone who voted for it. 

And, following this viz, I was invited to collaborate more on the Du Bois Challenge so you can look forward to that in the future!

Thanks for reading about my experience. You can check out the viz here.

The post SPOTLIGHT: W.E.B. Du Bois Portrait Gallery appeared first on Nightingale.

His book, Democracy’s Data, walks readers through the processes by which census data was conceptualized, gathered, and operationalized within the context of the historic 1940 census. The insights that emerge from this compelling narrative provide in-depth insights not only into the specifics of the US census, but also speak to the care and attention we should take when working with all datasets, especially those that aggregate individual human stories. In his book, Bouk writes,

“[O]ne cannot fully understand any data unless one knows what it includes, what it privileges, what is deprecates, and what it overlooks.”  

In 2012, the full data for the 1940 census was made publicly available, following the tradition of census data being fully released 72 years after its completion. Dan Bouk leverages this historical dataset to highlight the processes by which the Census questions were selected, the interactions between enumerators and residents where the data was gathered, and finally how the data was then used by the government for the furtherance of democracy and also for more questionable war-time objectives. 

In 1939, a large group of mostly white men, representing various federal government departments, labor unions, business representatives, and others, gathered in DC to decide what questions would be asked of all Americans in the census. This highly politicized process was consequential in determining not only the finalized census data, but also in shaping the political landscape of the country. In previous years, immigration status was included on the questionnaire and the results were used to fuel strong nationalist sentiment and fear, which eventually led to the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924. In addition to the types of questions that were asked, it was also significant to determine what the list of acceptable answers would be for these questions. Bouk devotes a chapter to exploring this issue–focusing in particular on the challenge of categorizing non-traditional family structures and the frequent umbrella term “partner” that was used to describe many on the margins of society. 

A large number of enumerators were recruited and trained across the country to undertake the ambitious task of counting every single American and to record their answers to the census questionnaire. The interactions that occurred between these enumerators and local residents profoundly affected the quality of data that was then aggregated. Seemingly simple questions, such as recording the resident’s name, required negotiations to align an individual’s unique cultural history and background into a standardized form required by the census. These negotiations were further complicated by a power imbalance and racial divide as the vast majority of enumerators in many states were white. For the 1940 census, and with any other datasets, Bouk reminds us that the process of data collection is far from an impartial transfer of information, but, in fact, represents a complex negotiation that requires close attention if we are to fully understand the scope and quality of the data we are analyzing. 

The final stage in the process that the book covers is how the data was used by various entities after it had been cleaned, categorized, and published. The aggregated population numbers were publicized but the central tenant of the census was individual privacy as information was not going to be shared with other government departments. However, shortly after the 1940 census was completed, the US formally joined World War II. One of the dark sides of the Census’ celebrated history is how they partnered with the military to share information that led to thousands of innocent people of Japanese ancestry, including many lawful US citizens, being illegally detained in internment camps. As there are frequent conversations today about the role of privacy and data, Bouk provides us with a historical reminder that these discussions are not abstract ethical conversations, but have powerful human implications.

When we visualize various types of data and use those visualizations to tell stories, we should take a minute to consider the story of how that data came to be in the first place. Rather than uncritically assuming the objectivity of data we work with, this book calls us to strategically assess the frame of the dataset, the way in which the data was gathered, and how we are using it. This book is a crucial read for anyone within the data visualization community who wants to learn how to read the stories behind the data.

Dan’s book is available now. Find it at several online outlets, including Macmillian’s site and Amazon!

Disclaimer: Some of the links in this post are Amazon Affiliate links. This means that if you click on the link and make a purchase, we may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you for your support!

The post REVIEW: Dan Bouk’ Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them appeared first on Nightingale.

Each district appears as a simplified “blob” representing specific use types. Blue dots mark out the main shopping streets with town halls marked with larger red dots. The only recognizable feature is the River Thames and associated waterways which snake horizontally across the map. Let’s take a closer look.

Seeing the bigger picture

London is an ancient city, established in 43 AD as “Londinium.” As the city outgrew its original Roman walls circa 950 AD, it rapidly expanded until it was the largest town in England by the 11th century. By 1605 London had 225,000 people–growing ultimately to its largest population of 8.6 million in 1939 . 

Then came WWII. England was systematically bombed by the Luftwaffe starting on September 7th, 1940 for 56 out of the following 57 days and nights. The German airforce dropped more than 18,000 tons of bombs on London, killing more than 40,000 English civilians, almost half of them in the capital city. More than two million houses in London were destroyed or damaged in what was to be called “the Blitz.” The trauma would cast a shadow over the character of the British people for generations. 

“The broad plan is complete, it must be translated into action”

London was never truly planned. Its growth was organic and its 18th-century streets were cramped. The rapid industrialization of the 18th and 19th centuries created some of the worst living conditions ever recorded. 

The Blitz worked counter to German plans and galvanized the British public to endure, fight, and overcome. It was in this spirit that Abercrombie’s Great London Plan was hatched to address five main issues at the time: 

1. Population growth
2. Housing
3. Employment and industry
4. Recreation
5. Transport

Author Sam Hind remarks, “… at varying scales, Abercrombie’s plans designed to foster a new type of urbanism. One borne out of the ensuing post-war virtues of order and dignity. As the map shows, Abercrombie’s vision was centered around new towns. These multiple city blobs, resembling spores on a petri dish, were designed to redistribute meaningful, livable space in and around the fringes of the densely built ‘City’ and West End areas.”

To support their plan, both Abercrombie and JH Forshaw described their ideas in a film produced in 1946 by the Ministry of Information called The Proud City (A Plan for London). The film itself is a polished introduction to the plan with plenty of optimistically montaged shots of everyday life, paired with urban planners, architects, and designers in white lab coats fervently drafting the future. The film must have been quite progressive for the time by using stop-motion animation techniques to show the history of the city and proposed interventions.

About halfway through the film, as the various talking heads walk through the plan, Ambercrombie shifts his attention from the various architectural models to a huge version of this map. (Personal aside – OMG, where is the original? Does anyone know?) He uses it as a way to show the relationship of all the communities as they relate to the overall plan. Ambercrombie explains that this map helps to integrate the Greater London Plan as a whole in order to “make life better and pleasanter for all of us.”

You can watch the newly restored film here:

“All things are ready if our minds be so”

This quote from the bard graces the introduction to the 1944 version of the Greater London Plan, and with it, the best mindset for all great dataviz experiences.

The Greater London Plan was only partially adopted in the end, as the complexities of the reconstruction outflanked Abercrombie and the best urban planners in England. While developers were not convinced (or required) to enact the plan, the project was popular enough to help define post-war optimism. Opportunities to provide better communication and transportation systems for the city center were not acted upon, but the groundwork for urban renewal (especially by the river) and suburban development helped create the London of today.

But why do I love the map?  Well, I’m a sucker for complex systems on a vast scale. This map is a perfect blend of optimism, diagrammatic speculation, and utopian idealism. It is unusual enough to demand your attention and friendly enough to help you see the bigger message. What’s not to like?

Here are some images from the book version. 

The post Patrick Abercrombie’s “The Greater London Plan” appeared first on Nightingale.