PublishedHarvard Business Review Press, June 2021 |
ISBN9780674975231 |
FormatHardcover, 320 pages |
Dimensions23.5cm × 15.6cm |
The story of how graphics left the exclusive confines of scientific research and became ubiquitous. As data visualization spread, it changed the way we think. Michael Friendly and Howard Wainer take us back to the beginnings of graphic communication in the mid-seventeenth century, when the Dutch cartographer Michael Florent van Langren created the first chart of statistical data, which showed estimates of the distance from Rome to Toledo.
By 1786 William Playfair had invented the line graph and bar chart to explain trade imports and exports. In the nineteenth century, the 'golden age' of data display, graphics found new uses in tracking disease outbreaks and understanding social issues. Friendly and Wainer make the case that the explosion in graphical communication both reinforced and was advanced by a cognitive revolution: visual thinking. Across disciplines, people realized that information could be conveyed more effectively by visual displays than by words or tables of numbers.
