[HN Gopher] Data Visualization and the Modern Imagination
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Data Visualization and the Modern Imagination
Author : rasmi
Score : 158 points
Date : 2021-01-26 15:16 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (exhibits.stanford.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (exhibits.stanford.edu)
| beckingz wrote:
| The Data Visualization Society is a great community for
| discussing historical visualization.
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| How does that work?
| alexkearns wrote:
| 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...
| petepete wrote:
| 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.
| sterkekoffie wrote:
| There are real-text headings above the button bank at the top
| and the images have the role="presentation" attribute, meaning
| they're meant to be ignored by assistive tech. What is there to
| address...
| ppod wrote:
| There don't seem to be many (any?) network diagrams (or what
| mathematicians strictly refer to by "graphs"). Are they a very
| recent invention?
| hansvm wrote:
| Not that recent at non-mathematician timescales, a few hundred
| years at least.
| ppod wrote:
| As diagrams? I couldn't find anything, who used them then?
| hansvm wrote:
| 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.
| leto_ii wrote:
| 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 also worth mentioning:
|
| [3] https://www.gsi.go.jp/atlas/archive/j-atlas-d_e_11.pdf
| parsecs wrote:
| 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.
| paganel wrote:
| On the subject of great-looking maps I highly recommend the
| second Austro-Hungarian Military Survey [1] from the
| 1860s-1870s, some of the details in those maps are truly
| exceptional (one of my personal projects consists in mapping
| the forested area of Romania's territory from nowadays using
| those maps).
|
| A little less accurate but more beautiful is the first Hapsburg
| Military Survey, from the late 1700s [2], when and if I'll ever
| get a bigger house I'll definitely hang some prints of those
| maps on the walls.
|
| [1] https://mapire.eu/en/map/europe-19century-
| secondsurvey/?laye...
|
| [2] https://mapire.eu/en/map/europe-18century-
| firstsurvey/?layer...
| motohagiography wrote:
| 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," diagrams show change over time, and provide the
| presenter with a way to demonstrate how they are the important
| pivot point that optimizes and drives that change. The "worst,"
| diagrams are the ones that illuminate the problem in such a way
| that it is no longer difficult, which humiliates the people it
| was presented to and designed to help.
|
| I recommend using data viz privately, to reason through and solve
| problems quickly, and then use the time you save for self
| investment. The real value I think is to use data viz not as a
| product for productivity, but as an arbitrage tool for leverage.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Do you have any examples of these "worst" diagrams?
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