11–20 of 21 posts
What I have learned about data viz over the years is that it is a very powerful solution to problems, just as Nightingale's diagrams demonstrated the effect of hygiene, which changed how societies and governments respond to epidemics. What I have also learned is that a solution obviates a dynamic someone thinks it is their job to manage, and a visualization that solves a problem is its own problem. The "best," diagra…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not that recent at non-mathematician timescales, a few hundred years at least.
As diagrams? I couldn't find anything, who used them then?
More recently, Euler's paper in 1736 didn't have what you'd recognize as a modern graph diagram, Konig's textbook in 1936 did, and the papers developing the subject between those dates eventually used the modern notion of lines connecting dots as a way to represent edges and nodes.
For more modern timeline visualisations, you might be interested in this list of timeline designs I compiled:
https://www.tiki-toki.com/blog/entry/ten-amazing-online-time...
I've flicked through this and it's honestly wonderful and beautifully presented, but why go to all that effort and then just render the headings in images without even providing any alt text? I hope this is an ongoing project and that will be addressed.
I have long been fascinated by timeline designs. So this is right up my street. So impressive what these artists of old managed to create without access to computers and design software. For more modern timeline visualisations, you might be interested in this list of timeline designs I compiled: https://www.tiki-toki.com/blog/entry/ten-amazing-online-time...
There is also a recent presentation of the design space of timelines in "Timelines Revisited: A Design Space and Considerations for Expressive Storytelling" [1, 2]. This then developed into the Timeline Storyteller tool [3].
[0]: https://papress.com/products/cartographies-of-time
[1]: https://timelinesrevisited.github.io/preprint.pdf
I would like to add one of my finds (if it's already mentioned in the original post, sorry for the double) - the National Atlas of Japan (1977) [1]. Take a look at the railway traffic statistics [2]. The visualization there must have been painstaking to make. [1] https://www.gsi.go.jp/atlas/atlas-e-etsuran.html [2] https://www.gsi.go.jp/atlas/archive/j-atlas-d_e_49.pdf edit: The earthquake epicenter visualization is…
Those are some beautiful visualizations. How did they do it in 1977, considering modern software like Tableau don't exist? The amount of expertise that goes into this must've been substantial.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not that recent at non-mathematician timescales, a few hundred years at least.
As diagrams? I couldn't find anything, who used them then?
The closest thing commonly seen in modern visualisation is the "Radial Tidy Tree": https://observablehq.com/@d3/radial-tidy-tree
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As diagrams? I couldn't find anything, who used them then?
Yes. If Knuth wasn't making stuff up then you can find some historic accounts (1300s-1500s) in "Two Thousand Years of Combinatorics." More recently, Euler's paper in 1736 didn't have what you'd recognize as a modern graph diagram, Konig's textbook in 1936 did, and the papers developing the subject between those dates eventually used the modern notion of lines connecting dots as a way to represent edges and nodes.