One of the best-known graphs in the history of data visualisation is the “rose diagram” that the nurse and statistician Florence Nightingale designed for her study of the mortality of British troops in the Crimean War in 1856. What fewer people know, however, is that she was not the creator of this chart. Nightingale used …
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE, ANDRÉ GUERRY AND POLAR AREA GRAPHICS Read More »
The Scottish engineer and economist William Playfair (1759-1823) is considered the father of statistical graphs. He pioneered the use of the line graph to represent time series and was the creator of the bar chart and the pie chart. Playfair’s life was punctuated by many vicissitudes as befitting the times he lived in. He carried …
WILLIAM PLAYFAIR, THE INVENTOR OF GRAPHS AND DATA VISUALISATION Read More »
THE MEDIA OFFERS CONTEXT-FREE DATA THAT DO NOT INFORM THE CITIZEN. A figure alone says nothing. It seems obvious, but I constantly repeat this to my students in the data visualisation courses I teach. And I do so because it is very common to see in the media how we are bombarded with facts and …
It is obvious that the answer is no. It is impossible to concentrate all the content of a report in an infographic, no matter how complex and extensive it is. However, the answer is not so simple if we formulate the question differently: Can we communicate an entire report or project through an infographic? Now …
DOES A REPORT (OR PROJECT) FIT IN AN INFOGRAPHIC? Read More »
Is an infographic the same as data visualisation? As with most questions, there is no definitive answer and it depends on the expert you ask. From our point of view, both exercises are part of the same family, being infographics a simpler element than visualisation. Let’s see how they differ. Alberto Cairo, in his book …