Napoleon March Map
This map by Charles Joseph Minard shows Napoleon's troops' round trip with the width of the line indicating soldier numbers and the colour representing direction. A temperature line graph below highlights the drastic drop in winter cold. Overall, the visualisation effectively depicts the journey's destruction with great detail.
1854 Broad Street Cholera Outbreak Map
This map visualisation by John Snow describes how small bar graphs were used to mark the number of cholera deaths at each household in a London neighbourhood, in an attempt to discover why the trend of deaths was higher in certain areas. The finding was that the households that suffered the most from cholera were all using the same well for drinking water, which was contaminated by sewage. This discovery helped trace a clearer line between the sickness and contaminated water wells, leading to the solution of building sewage systems and protecting wells from contamination to prevent cholera outbreaks.
New Chart of History
Popularly known for two timeline charts, Joseph Priestly's first creation is the Chart of Biography. This chart depicts a timeline spanning over 700 years, highlighting renowned men, leaders, and philosophers to reveal who was contemporarily active in history. Despite its simplicity, the Chart of Biography is regarded as one of the most crucial visualisations in history.
The Feltron Reports
Nicholas Felton is an information designer. His Feltron reports are perhaps his most iconic bodies of work. These are definitely very apt to the current project, except slightly on a macro scale as he is designing visualisations based on a year of his life. I think these are remarkable. I am not sure how one can stay sane when collecting data from an entire year of their life. That aside, the actual data visualisations he presents are highly interesting.
I quite like the way in which he presents a lot of the data. He uses a lot of tables and is quite sparing of graphs compared to the amount of data he presents. Any graph is interposed with great intent and they are mostly comparative which in my opinion is one of the best purposes of a graph. It means that the reports don’t feel contrived or cluttered but rather a summative dashboard of a large amount of data.
Plastic Waste Pollution - Jamie Kettle