Last updated
Last updated
The history of data visualization is full of impressive stories marked by major events, led by a few key peoples.This chapter will introduce you to some of the touching people who paved the way by combining design, data, science, and statistics in the past. We can see computer-based graphics frequently in today's world. A review of hand-crafted and historical data visualizations will provide an integral part of this chapter. It is important to see the power of data visualization to effectively explain the problem, make decisions for its solution and establish a cause-effect relationship.
Some examples of data visualization from history: William Playfair (1759–1823)
William Playfair is considered the father of statistical graphics, having invented the line and bar chart we use so often today. He is also credited with having created the area and pie chart. Playfair was a Scottish engineer and political economist who published in 1786.
This book featured a variety of graphs including the image below. In this famous example, he compares exports from England with imports into England from Denmark and Norway from 1700 to 1780.
On 21 October 1854, Florence Nightingale and the staff of 38 women volunteer nurses that she trained were sent to the Ottoman Empire. They were deployed in the Crimea, where the main British camp was based. Nightingale arrived early in November and her team found that poor care for wounded soldiers was being delivered by overworked medical staff in the face of official indifference. Medicines were in short supply, hygiene was being neglected, and mass infections were common, many of them fatal. There was no equipment to process food for the patients. After Nightingale sent a plea to The Times for a government solution to the poor condition of the facilities, the British Government commissioned Isambard Kingdom Brunel to design a prefabricated hospital that could be built in England and shipped to the Dardanelles. The result was Renkioi Hospital, a civilian facility which had a death rate less than 1/10th that of Scutari. (Source Wikipedia) In the case of this visualisation that it was developed with the specific aim of driving the important military hospital reforms through government to change lives The first edition of the Dictionary of National Biography (1911) asserted that Nightingale reduced the death rate from 42% to 2% either by making improvements in hygiene herself or by calling for the Sanitary Commission (Source Wikipedia)
The areas of the blue, red, & black wedges are each measured from the centre as the common vertex. The blue wedges measured from the centre of the circle represent area for area the deaths from Preventable or Mitigable Zymotic diseases, the red wedges measured from the centre the deaths from wounds, & the black wedges measured from the centre the deaths from all other causes. There is three data series plotting deaths by a custom grouping of cause over time.
John Snow (1813–1858)
In 1854, a cholera epidemic spread quickly through Soho in London. The Broad Street area had seen over 600 dead, and the remaining residents and business owners had largely fled the terrible disease.
Physician John Snow plotted the locations of cholera deaths on a map. The surviving maps of his work show a method of tallying the death counts, drawn as lines parallel to the street, at the appropriate addresses. Snow’s research revealed a pattern. He saw a clear concentration around the water pump on Broad Street, helping to find the cause of the infection.
Charles Joseph Minard (1781–1870)
Charles Joseph Minard was a French civil engineer famous for his representation of numerical data on maps. His most famous work is the map of Napoleon’s Russian campaign of 1812 displaying the dramatic loss of his army over the advance on Moscow and the following retreat.
You can see how many soldiers are still marching and how many died. Drawn in 1869, it is described by many as the best statistical graphic ever drawn. It represents the earliest beginnings of data journalism.
Edmond Halley was an English astronomer, geophysicist, mathematician, meteorologist, and physicist who is best known for computing the orbit of Halley’s Comet.
Charles de Fourcroy was a French mathematician and scholar. He produced a visual analysis of the work of French civil engineers and a comparison of the demographics of European cities.
In 1782 he published Tableau Poléometrique, a treatise on engineering and civil construction. His use of geometric shapes predates the modern treemap, which is widely used today to display hierarchical data.
Luigi Perozzo was an Italian mathematician and statistician who stood out for being the first to introduce 3D graphical representations, showing the relationships between three variables on the same graph.
Perozzo published one of the first 3D representations of data showing the age group of the Swedish population between the 18th and 19th centuries.
According to , Halley developed the use of contour lines on maps to connect and describe areas that display differences in atmospheric conditions from place to place. These lines are now commonly used to describe meteorological variation common to us from weather reports.
