Historical and Contemporary Visualisation (Part 1)

• Data visualisation can reduce the time necessary for understanding a given event, but at the same time it augments the viewer’s capacity to grasp and interrelate the complex data. Data visualisation presents its audience with tools to be able to analyse and make comparisons for themselves with the data.
• Leon introduces some early forms of data visualisation, including visualisations from Charles Joseph Minard, Florence Nightingale and Otto Neurath.
• Minard created a visualisation of the strength of Napoleon’s army as he invaded Russia. The army’s forces died down very quickly due to the extreme cold temperatures and lack of food for horses. The visualisation depicts Napoleon’s army where it starts around 400,000 as it depletes to around 10,000. As an early visualisation, it is a bit difficult to follow, but there is a lot of information available in the graph.
• Florence Nightingale recorded the deaths and causes of death during the Crimean war, while she was working in the hospitals. She recorded that majority of the deaths were due to disease, rather than battle inflicted or other causes of death. She was able to use this information and present it to improve the standards in the hospitals. Her graph is well known, and allows the audience to easily compare the amount of deaths, causes and change over time.
• Otto Neurath created a museum for visualisations, and introduced the serialisation of images, where multiple images of the same size can be used to represent a larger quantity. Neurath also brought visualisation to an industrial scale, where printing presses were used.