En chiffres

I wrote 56 posts/articles in the past year, so on average I managed to produce one a week, even though I took it a bit easier over the summer. I now have nearly a thousand subscribers/followers (including six paying subscribers – thank you!), and on average 40 per cent of recipients open the posts in the newsletter. On average, 800 people read each post. It’s quite rare for this figure to exceed 1000, and it’s only ever gone over 2000 once.

To my regret, new subscribers don’t read the older articles in the archive. The articles do not spread organically, even if I’m not shy about promoting them and share them across every possible platform in multiple formats. My posts don’t reach those dataviz-influencers, nor do they reach the various groups and communities on Reddit and other platforms where these graphics might attract a little bit more attention. If anything, it is even sadder that articles relating to Hungary, my own country, fail to stir the domestic community. There could be numerous reasons for this, but I’ll keep my thoughts on the matter to myself for now. In any case, let’s face it, these aren’t impressive results, yet I’m not dissatisfied, partly because I do this for myself as well, and I’m enjoying it!

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Over the course of a year, I have presented hundreds of previously unknown, or lesser known historical diagrams, graphs, charts, infographics and maps from more than 40 countries. However, their geographical distribution remains painfully uneven. It remains a source of great regret to me that Africa – with the exception of one country – is, completely absent from this map, whilst Central and South America, as well as Central and South-East Asia, would also deserve far greater representation. I will discuss the possible reasons for this shortfall in more detail below. All I can promise is that Central Asia and South America will be on the agenda in the near future.

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Your and my favourites

It’s really interesting to see how much your interests differ from my own personal favourites. Let’s take a look at the ten most-read articles and compare them with my favourites.

Top ten most read articles

My five picks

Lessons learnt and the situation of our heritage

I have spent a significant part of the past years searching and browsing in the various depths of digital archives and libraries. Translation apps (such as DeepL) have been a great help, but AI (primarily GPT and Claude) has also helped me identify numerous obscure sources, particularly in recent months. This research has yielded marvellous results from the deepest recesses and unknown corners of the internet, and most of these are still awaiting publication. However, this research has also brought with it a number of sad realizations.

Sloppy, incomplete digitization

I found a great many promising atlases, books, publications and statistical reports in which the librarian or archivist responsible for the digitization had either scanned the graphics carelessly and in poor quality, or had simply omitted them altogether. In many cases, I found instances where large, folded visualisations had not been unfolded; on other occasions, they had been cut in half; and in yet other instances, colour graphics had simply been scanned in black and white. This is likely due to the fact that the archiving policy prioritized the preservation of written heritage, whilst the graphic elements were not considered important or valuable. To put it another way, books, journals and other publications are primarily written records, rather than works that form a unified whole through their graphic content.

There is no standard model for access

Different countries and institutions, even within the European Union, interpret copyright differently. Many countries still do not make works available for download in high resolution images, even in cases when copyright has long expired. Other countries make the downloading and re-use of works that have already been digitized subject to registration or, in some cases, payment. The most extreme case was when, acting on a hunch and based on the catalogue’s descriptive details, I requested a German institution to scan a document, for which I paid as required. But I am unable to publish this sensational find online because that would require me to pay a further 300 Euros annually. So if, after a year, I were not to pay again 300 Euros for the following year, I would have to remove the image from the article. I am aware that memory preservation institutions around the world are underfunded, and as a result many governments force them to make up for budget shortfalls through commercial activities. A fair reproduction fee tailored to the type of publication is reasonable, but the exorbitant sum charged for individual publications – particularly after the copyright has expired – is unacceptable. This significantly hinders scientific discovery and the publication of research findings. I also sincerely believe that this runs counter to the interests of the institution which preserves a specific artefact.

Inequalities

The digital libraries or archives of many Asian, African and Latin American countries are inaccessible from Hungary. In many cases, the server does not respond, or the admin host refuses to allow the page to be opened, citing security reasons. Some countries make access to their digitized materials conditional on citizenship or possession of a local identity card. Even when a digital archive is accessible in these regions, I often find library systems that are extremely outdated, old, painfully slow and terribly cumbersome to use.

All of this makes it considerably more difficult to gain a more complete and balanced picture of the history of data visualization worldwide. Once again, it is precisely the poorer countries that are left out, because they are unable to allocate significant funds to the digitization of their cultural heritage, or those that, for political or ideological reasons, severely restrict access to their treasures.

Of course, it cannot be ruled out that there may also be reasons relating to heritage and collection preservation. Collections in certain wealthy Western countries are rapidly digitizing the cultural heritage of the Global South without these countries – many of which were once colonies – deriving any benefit from it. From this perspective, the strategy adopted by these countries is entirely understandable.

The unexplored West

It is worth mentioning the paradox that, although the canonical narrative is essentially based on French, German, English and American graphic works, I have unearthed an astonishing number of previously unknown, fantastic charts and maps from these very countries too. If I were to publish only the unknown works from these four countries every week, I’d have enough content for my blog for the next two years.

History buffs, unite!

One final observation. We might be inclined to think that very few people are interested academically in the history of data visualization, and that those who are are exclusively American, British, French or German. Over the past year, partly thanks to Cabinet, I have come to know researchers and information designers from the Netherlands, Argentina, Russia, India, Turkey, Romania, Austria and Peru who, whilst this may not be their main field of research or activity, have nevertheless written about the history of statistical graphics and diagrams of their own countries. It would be wonderful to bring all this knowledge together, whether through a conference or a collection of papers.

All comments and feedback are welcome.

With unwavering enthusiasm,

Attila

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In the header of the page, there is a dot map, which is of rather poor quality but still somewhat legible. It was this that eventually led me to the magnificent religious map by Louis Rinn (1838–1905), the French battalion commander and later head of Indigenous Affairs in Algeria. This map is a simplified, yet still attractive, hand drawn copy of the original from 1884, created sometime in the early 20th century.

The truly remarkable map, however, is the original, designed by Louis Rinn and drawn by captain Henri Bissuel. The map was published in 1884 as an illustration accompanying Rinn’s book Marabouts et Khouan. Étude sur l’Islam en Algérie (Marabouts and khouan1. A study of Islam in Algeria). Both the book and the map was published by Adolphe Jourdan in Algiers.

Although the map’s title reveals its subject matter, it is only upon closer inspection that it becomes clear that its leaf-like style of representation is unconventional, and that it aims not merely to illustrate the spatial distribution and size (see the legend) of these Muslim brotherhoods, but also their genealogies and the relationships between them.

It is also worth noting the trees drawn along the edges and at the bottom of the map, from whose trunks the various brotherhoods have spread out across Algeria. In this sense, the tree – from its roots right through to its fruit – can also symbolize the lineage stretching from the founders to the later Sufi orders.

Although the depiction of the plants on the map is almost certainly inspired by the often highly stylised illustrations found in Arabic botanical manuscripts, it is nevertheless unlikely that it could be identified as one of the sacred plants of the Arab/Berber/Islamic world (pomegranate, olive, fig, argan, etc.).

The map also includes a smaller map showing the migrations of the four largest brotherhoods in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as a table listing the founders of the various brotherhoods, along with their places of birth and burial.

If anyone knows French and has access to Bernadette Saou-Dufréne’s book chapter (unfortunately, I don’t have), they will no doubt be able to find out much more about how the map came about.

This map, too, is a product of French colonial cartography, just like the Atlas of the Upper Mekong and its superb, unconventional legend. There is also another interesting French colonial economic atlas, I shall be writing about that soon as well. It is as though, far from Paris, these local administrators were able to adopt a bolder or less conventional visual language.

More similar articles

Some news

Paul Kahn’s wonderful new book, Mapping Knowledge Across Time. Seven Books that Visualized the World is finally published by Routledge/CRC Press. I was fortunate enough to read it before its publication and wrote a short review to it, and I can say that it is a marvellous book. It is a thoroughly researched and insightful work on the ideologically, politically and culturally defined visual and information design systems of various eras and cultures, amongst which numerous similarities can nevertheless be identified.

From 21 August, the exhibition On Display: How Design Shapes Us is on view at the Museum of Applied Arts in Frankfurt; its ‘Design, Power(s), Knowledge’ section was designed by Robin Coenen and Danielle Rosales (Visual Intelligence, Berlin). Coenen and Rosales’s enormous panels, modelled on Aby Warburg’s legendary Mnemosyne Atlas, explore when and with what information design tools humanity has depicted such diverse concepts as history, people, society and systems, and how these have represented power structures and contradictions. I also made a small contribution to this project: for the section on economic systems, I provided György Markos’s anti-capitalist system diagrams, and I also wrote the accompanying text for the catalogue. If you happen to be in Frankfurt, do pop in and have a look!

The full line-up for the Information Design Conference is gradually taking shape. I’ll also be giving a talk on the Cabinet of Infographic Curiosities at the conference, which takes place on 30 October in Hilversum, the Netherlands, but of course people will be coming to see such heavyweight stars as Nadieh Bremer, Jen Christiansen, Julie Brunet, Jan Schwochow, James Cheshire and many other brilliant names.

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As I wrote earlier, it is difficult to pinpoint Hickmann’s exact place in the chronology of pictorial statistics. Clearly, Hickmann was not the first to use this method. The heyday and popularity of Hickmann’s atlases coincided precisely with the period when pictorial statistics was taking its first steps following the publication of George Mulhall’s 1884 Dictionary of Statistics. Richard Peale’s Popular Compendium series with pictorial statistics and 3D diagrams was launched in 1883, and Randy McNally and Co. also published atlases and brochures with these types of graphics from the late 1880s. I also know isometric statistical diagrams from Chile and Argentina dating from the early 1890s.

If we treat both Mulhall, Peale and McNally as separate stages, then Hickmann represents the 19th-century culmination of pictorial statistics in this process. While Mulhall’s work still consists of schematic pictograms, Peale’s and Rand McNally’s publications give them form and substance. In Hickmann’s work, finally—I can’t think of a better word for it—they possess a sense of decorum. Hickmann’s drawings are not only detailed and elaborate, but in some of his publications, the illustrations are even given gold and silver accents that glisten in the light.

In this post, I am not praising Hickmann’s own work—others have done that on the internet many times before me, most lately the Belgian information designer Koen Van den Eeckhout on LinkedIn. I want to draw attention to how Hickmann’s graphic style and design choices appear in other statistical publications. His impact is obvious and striking when one digs into European archives. I found publications in Romania, Hungary, Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia that either copied Hickmann’s pictorial statistical charts and dashboard-like pages or were very similar to them. This style-analysis and formalist method in pictorial statistics, borrowed from art history, is of interest to us precisely because it rarely works with abstract, diagrammatic statistical representations. Consequently, in Hickmann’s case, it is possible to outline his actual influence—which extends primarily to Eastern Europe—with a fair degree of precision.

Hickmann’s most influential work was the Geographisch-statistischer Universal-Taschen-Atlas, published in 1894 by the prestigious Viennese map publishing house, Freytag & Berndt. Czech, Hungarian and Romanian translations of the pocket atlas began to appear in 1897, and after 1900, subsequent editions—published after Hickmann’s death in 1906 under the revision of the statistician and geographer, Neurath-colleague Alois Fischer1—were also translated into English, French, and Russian. The atlas went through at least ten editions between 1894 and 1931. The last edition of the pocket-size series was published in 1909. It was relaunched in 1921 in a larger format, now with the collaboration of Fischer.

In the first 1894 edition, Hickmann used only simple bar charts and varied the sizes of the squares and circles. In this respect, he still follows in Mulhall’s footsteps. The 1897 edition—even if only on a single double-page spread—already features three 3D graphic depicting global grain, alcohol, and iron and coal production. In the same year Freytag & Berndt published a large size wall chart by Hickmann showing Germany’s and the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s wine and beer production. In this chart, Hickmann already showcases nearly the entire arsenal of 3D pictorial statistics.

In the Taschen Atlas’s 1902 edition Hickmann added four new pages of pseudo 3D diagrams and pictorial charts. The versions published after 1921 retained some of the charts from earlier editions but were supplemented with new ones.

It may have been less widely circulated, but Hickmann’s other pocket atlases, which also were published several times from 1895, focused specifically on the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and Germany. The Geographisch-statistischer Taschen-Atlas von Österreich-Ungarn and the Geographisch-statistischer Taschen-Atlas des deutschen Reichs also made extensive use of 3D graphics. Unfortunately, Hickmann’s historical atlas of Vienna, published in 1903, has not been digitized, and I don’t have my own copy of it either. However, based on the pages available online, the stylistic difference is evident. A possible reason for this is that it was published not by Freytag & Berndt, but by Hörder.

The images above provide a comprehensive overview of Hickmann’s drawing technique, his stylistic characteristics and his typical diagram types. Of course, Hickmann’s style is also deeply rooted in the tradition of 19th-century drawings and illustrations. The examples below will serve to show how Hickmann’s style, shapes and forms (coins piled on top of one another, barrels, parcels, sugar jars, ships, boxes, safes, etc.) appear in both contemporary and later statistical works, and which later became clichés.

Of course, it cannot be ruled out that someone might have developed a similar style and types of diagrams without being familiar with Hickmann’s work. Systematic research would be needed to demonstrate even more convincing way Hickmann’s direct influence. In the case of Russia, Vladimir Laptev writes about Hickmann’s influence in his monograph Russian Infography, and in his article in Nightingale.

Most of my examples are taken from albums produced specifically for representational or promotional purposes, but these same types of drawings can be found in hundreds of articles, publications, leaflets, postcards, posters and exhibition panels. It is likely that, in the early 20th century, the general public encountered statistical data primarily through such illustrations.

Romania

Carte statistique agricole

by Nicolae Cucu Starostescu
Bucharest: Service Central Statistique, 1900
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Progresele economice ale României, îndeplinite sub domnia Majestății Sale Regelui Carol I, 1866-1906

by Leonida Colescu
Bucharest: Carel Göbl, 1907
Source: Mihail Eminescu Central University Library Iasi

Russia

Atlas of Charts on Economic Issues / vol. 8 - Russia in the World Family

by Ivan Khristoforovich Ozerov
Moscow: Printing House of the I.D. Sytin Partnership, 1909
Source: Russian State Public History Library

Atlas of Diagrams on Economic and Political Questions

Explanatory Text by V. Yudovsky
Department of Educational Aids of the Main Political Education Admin.
State Publishing House, 1925
Source: Russian State Library

Estonia

Statistical album Vol. II. Economy

Compiled by Viktor Schmidt
Tallin: Central Statistical Bureau/State Printing House (Riigi Trükidoda), 1926
Source: National Library of Estonia/Digar

Agriculture in Estonia

Edited by A. Pullerits
Tallin: Central Statistical Bureau/State Printing House (Riigi Trükidoda), 1928
Source: National Library of Estonia/Digar

Lithuania

Lietuva Skaitmenimis 1918–1928/La Lithuanie en chiffres - album de diagrammes

Central Statistical Bureau/Ministry of Finances, 1928
Source: Archive.org

Italy

Lo sviluppo dell’industria italiana

Rome: Confederazione generale fascista dell'industria italiana/Associzaione fra le società italiane per azioni 1929
Source: David Rumsey Map Collection

It’s actually surprising that, given how popular Hickmann was in his own time and even later until the 1930s, we know almost nothing about his life. For a long time, I, too, had overlooked Hickmann, until Paul Kahn, whose wonderful new book, Mapping Knowledge Across Time has just been published, drew my attention to him a few years ago.

Perhaps our aversion to pictorial statistics, which was widely used for propaganda, that causes us to keep our distance from it despite its popularity, and that has led to Hickmann’s name falling into almost oblivion. However, once I got my hands on a few of his atlases and was able to flip through them in physical form, Hickmann’s creativity and talent became clear. Many of his graphic solutions are exceptionally ingenious, and few scientists have devoted such care to the quality of their graphic design. If one looks more closely into Hickmann’s body of work, one will see that, in addition to his widely popular works, he also produced countless lesser-known statistical maps, booklets, and other atlases.

Very few people in the 19th century left behind such a substantial and influential body of statistical graphic work. A couple of enthusiasts of the history of data visualisation cherish his memory, but not a single journal article has been published on his work in statistics and cartography. It would be great if someone were to write a fitting biography of his life and oeuvre.2 It’s also possible that someone wrote it, but I just haven’t found it. If that’s the case, please let me know!

Others have also suggested that Hickmann’s work can be regarded as a precursor to Isotype. Although Otto Neurath makes no mention of Hickmann or his atlases in his visual autobiography, From Hieroglyphics to Isotype, originally published in 1945, the role played by Alois Fischer – who took over the editing of Hickmann’s atlas – in the development of Isotype would be worth exploring in greater depth.

2

As with other things, it’s not worth relying on AI for this either. There is an AI-generated biography of Hickmann on the internet what I don’t link here, and it’s full of errors, inaccuracies, contradictions, and fabrications.

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Attila Bátorfy's Cabinet of Infographic Curiosities is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This also means that while I’m lounging on the beach and strolling through small villages, I won’t have time to write, sometimes you just need to relax. In the meantime, here’s another round of strange (see here the Christmas edition), weird or spectacular diagrams, data graphics, and maps that I’ve set aside for myself while browsing in digital collections.

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This time we’re taking it to the next level and picking up a book on 3D anaglyph descriptive/solid geometry that actually requires 3D glasses to view: the Hungarian mathematician Imre Pál’s book Térláttatós ábrázoló mértan published in 1959. The book was translated to English in 1962 under the title Descriptive Geometry with Three-Dimensional Figures. It had German, Spanish, Russian and Slovak translations too.

Many years ago, I bought it just out of curiosity—it looked interesting, and I’d never seen anything like it before. Over the years, however, I’ve come to appreciate it more and more. And I finally got around to scanning it.

The book is essentially a handbook. On the one hand, it explains how to draw and construct these anaglyphic spatial figures; on the other hand, it demonstrates their applications in mathematics, physics, engineering, architecture, and again, cartography.

The book is structured according to the principle of progressing from simple to complex, beginning with straight lines and simple bodies, moving on to curves and spherical shapes and bodies, and concluding with irregular shapes and bodies and topographic and 3D relief visualizations.

It’s strange, because these abstract anaglyph images are interesting on their own. But their “holographic” effect really comes through when viewed with 3D glasses. If you don’t have any on hand, don’t worry! For example, the NASA’s website has instructions on how to make your own. In our case, I recommend buying cyan and red-coloured acetate at an art supply or stationery store, rather than blue and red.

When I posted a few photos of this book on Twitter a couple of years ago, the creative coding community immediately responded. Tony Chou rendered an anaglyph cube on Observable, and another user created anaglyphs in Processing.

I’m not sure how many possibilities there are in this in data visualization. In any case, there have been previous attempts; the statistician Jürgen Symanzik, in particular, has been working on this since the early 1990s.

I’d be also curious to see, for example, a storytelling project created specifically using this technique. Or even a map. If you know of any, please let me know!

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I don’t pretend that I understand what’s in this handbook. As the title tells, it contains function tables and graphs (curves), as well as equations and formulae. I was familiar with the terms “sine,” “cosine,” and “logarithmic integral” up to the first chapter. But that’s obviously not why this book belongs here on the Cabinet of Infographic Curiosities! What makes it particularly interesting aren’t the traditional function graphs in a Cartesian coordinate system, nor even the beautiful diagrams that look like sewing patterns called '“altitude charts”. What’s impressive about it are the 3D versions of those altitude charts, as they are called in the book: reliefs. The book contains 177 graphs and diagrams, here are my favourites so far.

When it comes to statistical diagrams, Luigi Perozzo’s “stereogram” is the first thing that comes to my mind. I recommend that everyone read RJ Andrews’ two-part article on Perozzo’s 3D statistical charts and how RJ recreated them.

Chartography

Bellissimi Data Graphics

Welcome to Chartography—insights and delights from the world of data storytelling…

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8 months ago · 24 likes · 4 comments · RJ Andrews

But without these functions, cartography would not exist either. The Jahnke–Emde function tables contained many specialized functions (logarithms, trigonometric functions, elliptic integrals, etc.) that were regularly required in engineering, geodesy and cartography. Let us not forget: map projections, curves, and terrain and elevation models are functions too!

News

I have been invited to the Information Design Conference, where I will be speaking about Cabinet of Infographic Curiosities. The conference will take place on October 30, 2026, in Hilversum, the Netherlands. So far, they’ve announced me and the fantastic James Cheshire.

Our papa, Michael Friendly has a brand new book, Visualizing Multivariate Data and Models in R. The final print version will be published by CRC Press this year. Until then an online version is already available here with many-many historical examples. Congrats, Michael! You can read my interview with Michael here:

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Five years ago, I wrote an article about Markos’s life and pictorial data graphics for Nightingale, the journal of the Data Visualization Society. At that time, I wrote the following:

According to Markos, his first significant graphic work was the Les Trusts contre La France (Trusts Against France). In the epilogue of his Hungarian booklet, 50 Families and their Servants, from 1947, he writes that “this work is based on my pre-war work in France about the role in the society of the two hundred French families (Les Trusts contre La France — Trösztök Franciaország ellen. — L’Humanité-kiadás.).” Zoltán Tatai, in his biographical summary of the literary and ideological oeuvre of Markos, writes that his 200 families booklet on the French financial capital was published in 1937 (Tatai 1984), and the Hungarian Telegraph Agency’s biography also gives the 1937 date for the publication. But Markos tells — in the aforementioned interview — that the booklet was published in 1936 and it was a joint work with Pierre Lenoir (Sükösd 1975: 54). The contemporary French reviews put the date 1937 for the publication, but I can’t find Markos’ name amongst the contributors. The authors were the union leader, later Nobel Prize-winner, and labour activist Léon Jouhaux, the Sorbonne-professor Marcel Prenant, the Hungarian-born, Marxist philosopher, Georges Politzer, and the Communist politician, Jacques Duclos. The graphic work was organized by the Swiss engineer, Georges Baehler alias Pierre Lenoir, secretary of the Maison de la Technique of the French Communist Party. The illustrators were the caricaturist Raoul Cabrol and René Dubosc, and we know the pseudonyms of two designers, May and Lépine. Since we don’t know whether Markos used any alias in his emigration, we can’t preclude the possibility that May or Lépine could be Markos. Finally, it is worth noting, in 1946, Baehler published a book on the Swiss cement industry (Zement und Baumaterialen Trust) under the pseudonym Pollux with a series of complex, but non-figurative, network diagrams (Nichols 2018).1

…

The newspaper L’Humanité published a coloured advertising poster showing the networked connections between French millionaires, right-wing parties, and corporations in 1936 to promote the booklet. This design is similar to the design Markos used in his Hungarian booklet in 1947. At this point, it’s not clear the extent to which, if at all, Markos contributed to the Les Trusts.

Since our knowledge of Markos’s adventurous life comes almost exclusively from his autobiography (Vándorló fegyház, The Wandering Prison, 1971) and a 1975 interview with him, I was skeptical from the start. Unfortunately, five years ago I didn’t know that Markos’s pseudonym while in exile was May. I only found this out later, when I read the posthumous tribute written by his former fellow émigré, Iván Boldizsár, on the occasion of Markos’s eightieth birthday (Markos died at his 73 in 1976). The article also reveals that Markos had been using the pseudonym “May” since 1931, starting with his years in Berlin, and according to Boldizsár, “Germany knows him as May, because he signed his magnificent political illustrations, caricatures, and charts with the pseudonym May”. It’s a side plot for now, but none of these illustrations have yet been identified. But based on this “May” information, I have since been able to identify many of his graphics that appeared in the French newspaper Régards and the weekly Monde (the literature has often confused it with Le Monde, as I have as well).

Les Trusts contre la France

Of course, I am not the first one to notice this graphic album. The great Steven Heller had already written a brief piece about it in 2014 as part of his Daily Heller series in Print Magazine. He described the album as French Communist Party infographics on steroids, and concludes the article by writing that:

“Almost 90 years since they were produced, the imagery is still useable in contemporary contexts. Progressive reform is just words. Whether Democrat or Republican, these images not only speak truth to power, they speak of many affiliations that are still maintained by the same players.”

In his article, Heller includes a few small size scans from the album, but they may not fully convey the power of Markos’s artwork.

The first thing that surprised me was the album’s relatively large size. For several reasons. Based on the images I found earlier online on various secondhand bookstore websites, I had the impression that this was a publication about the size of an average book. The other thing that might have misled me is that Markos’s graphic works in Hungary are generally small in size.

Another thing that surprised me was that I had previously thought this was a book with pages of illustrations, not an actual graphic album printed on paper that’s almost as thick as cardboard. In contrast, the album contains 24 single-page spreads, 1 double-page spread, and 8 large-format fold-out pages.

The third surprise is related to the previous one. A few low-quality photos and scans had already appeared online in some places, and based on those, I never would have dreamed that they would have scanned in what are practically the least interesting and least visually striking pages. As you start flipping through the album, you’ll be amazed at every turn.

Most of the graphic works by Markos that I was familiar with were in black and white, grayscale, or black and red (Hundred years of the Hungarian industry, 1942). He merely co-edited the only Hungarian publication printed in full colour: Hungary’s economy and the three years plan in 1948. for the graphic design work, Markos commissioned well-known Hungarian graphic artists of the time.

Chronologically speaking, then, the earlier Les Trusts is Markos’s most important, ambitious and bombastic graphic project. I don’t want to keep the reader in suspense any longer; let’s take a look at some pages of Les Trusts. Be prepared!

The above accounts for only about two-thirds of the album’s illustrations, and I haven’t even taken Cabrol’s and Dubosc’s caricatures into account. It is worth comparing these network diagrams with those Markos published ten years later, adapted to Hungarian conditions, which appeared in the 1947 propaganda pamphlet 50 Families and Their Servants. As we can see, many of Markos’s earlier pictograms—such as the bank vault, the factory, and the top-hatted, cigar-smoking capitalist—make a comeback.

In Hungarian-language literature, it has become widely accepted that Markos wrote the entire work, and Markos himself referred to it as if the entire album were his own creation. This is clearly not the case. The caricatures are signed, so it is possible to tell which ones were created by Cabrol and which by Dubosc. In the case of the diagrams, it is difficult to determine what role Georges Baehler alias “Pierre Lenoir” (Black Peter) played in the artistic direction and what contribution the graphic artist named “Lépine” (The Thorn - this nickname was often given to soldiers and people with difficult personalities) made.

Like Heller, I, too, cannot decide to what extent—despite the propagandistic and activist nature of the graphics—the intertwining of these families, banks, trusts, corporations, and political parties is the result of communist conspirationalist thinking. In any case, looking at these diagrams in retrospect, Mark Lombardi’s Narrative Structures diagrams, or Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et. al. conceptual work inevitably came to mind. As Sebastian Giessmann writes in The Connectivity of Things analyzing Baehler’s and Lombardi’s networks:

“From this perspective, conspiracy theories turn out not to be a crude simplification so much as a paranoiac-critical method of network analysis. They bring a fundamental property of the network as a cultural technique to light: both legitimate and illegitimate forms of knowledge foreground connections, whether public or secret. Anyone who maps political and economic entanglements as networks of power walks a fine line between analysis and conspiratorial speculation, although the paranoid character of such knowledge is almost completely purged from academic accounts. In the figures in this chapter, by contrast, it is present and pressing. Charting the economic order and all its transactions quickly leads to paranoia…”

Cited works:

Benedek, István Gábor 1976. Búcsú Markos Györgytől. (Farewell from Markos György). In Magyar Hírlap, 16th July 1976, p. 5

Giessmann, Sebastian 2024. The Connectivity of Things. Network Cultures since 1832. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. OA.

Heller, Steven 2014. That Pesky 1 Percent. Daily Heller, Printmag, October 21. 2014.

Nichols, Sarah 2018. Pollux’s Spears. In “The Costs of Architecture”, special issue, Grey Room 71 (spring 2018), pp. 141–155.

Sükösd, Mihály 1975. Markos György. In Valóság Vol. XVIII. №4, pp. 51–62.

Tatai, Zoltán 1984: Markos György, a szocialista tervgazdaság szervezője és propagandistája. (Markos György, the organizer and propagandist of the Socialist planned economy) In Egyetemi Szemle Vol. VI , №1, pp. 131–135.

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1

About Baehler’s (Pollux) network diagrams see: Sarah Nichols: Pollux’s Spears. Grey Room No. 71 (spring 2018), pp. 141–155. and Sebastian Giessmann: A Visual History of the Network Diagram (III): Economic Entanglements and the Mediology of Conspiracy. In Sebastian Giessmann: The Connectivity of Things. Network Cultures Since 1832. Cambridge, MA, 2024. pp. 239–271.

The story of the Hungarian water management official and self-made economic journalist Dénes Marosi Nagy is both mysterious and entertaining—insofar as an unfulfilled dream can be entertaining.

The diagram appears

Marosi Nagy’s name first appears in the December 3, 1924 issue of the newspaper Budapesti Hírlap, immediately in connection with a diagram on which the rest of the story is based. The brief review concerns the third issue of a now unobtainable series of booklets titled Analízis by Dénes Nagy (as he was then known). From it, we learn that the issue analyzes the relationship between money and the circulation of goods, as well as the capitalist state system, while the flow of money is illustrated by a hand-drawn graph.

The next news item in which Dénes Nagy’s name appears is a parliamentary report in the February 11, 1927, issue of Az Újság. The article’s anonymous author writes:

“In the ruling party’s corridor, many people gazed at Mr. Dénes Nagy’s budget graph. All sorts of lines ran around on a huge sheet of white cardboard in red, blue, green, black, and other colors. This interesting experiment was modelled on the human circulatory system. The Ministry of Finance represented the heart, from which money flows out like arteries to various sectors of the economy; then the veins take over and transport the money back in the form of income to all of our hearts—the Ministry of Finance. It’s a sort of vicious circle, but it reflects real life, and even an elementary school child can learn from it what the much-discussed public finances are”.

The diagram so captivated Az Újság that nine days later it devoted two columns to it—more precisely, to the diagram’s design and description (Újság 1927/41: 11). The author of the article expresses the view that

“it would be beneficial if our schools taught young people the basics of economics in such a visual format. There would be ample opportunity for teachers to explain to the younger generation the role played in the life of the state by the National Bank, the ministries, state-owned enterprises, and banks, so that children would better understand what credit is—a concept they can hardly imagine or retain in their minds without visual aids.”

A diagram-mural lost forever

We jump forward another two years, and the Nemzeti Újság reports on yet another milestone in the career of the official now known as Dénes Marosi-Nagy (the far more prominent sociologist and economist Dénes Nagy had, in the meantime, adopted the name Kislégi).

The single-column report published on February 10, 1929, reveals a real treat: one wall of the small conference room at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the so-called “Baross Hall,” or Small Boardroom is adorned with a four-meter-wide and three-meter-high (!) graph by Dénes Marosi Nagy. From the description, we learn that this “graph” is a grandiose adaptation of the diagram previously known. The reporter writes: “The graph, which fills the entire wall of the room, is almost staggering with its dazzlingly complex network, colorful veins, flows symbolizing the country’s economic circulation, and an immeasurable mass of data. The author of the image spent a year not only drawing the image but also editing it, compiling it, collecting the data, and organizing it into a system, even though a single year is barely sufficient for the technical production of the drawing alone.” The article also promises that the newspaper’s pictorial supplement will publish a photograph of the diagram, but so far it has not been possible to locate this photograph.

The Economic Order

In 1930, Marosi Nagy privately published his proposal for an economic film in both French and English, for which he later registered a copyright on two separate occasions and in English, French and German languages (Corvina 1930/45: 233, KÉ 1931/33: 563, 1931/52: 942) At this point, it was not yet clear that Marosi Nagy was thinking in terms of synergies and that the patent registration was the first manifestation of a much more ambitious plan.

In 1932, Marosi Nagy’s book A gazdasági rend (The Economic Order) summarizing ideas that had been maturing for nearly a decade, was published by the prestigious Pallas publishing house. The book contains thirty, mostly coloured diagrams and flowcharts illustrating the flow of money and goods across various eras and political systems. The diagrams are beautifully drawn; most are more or less understandable, while others are extremely complex, illegible, or nonsensical. Particularly interesting are the figures that depict the economy using flowcharts that truly resemble blood circulation.

The book was received positively by the contemporary press, which highlighted the novelty of his argumentation using diagrams. The field of economics, however, neglected Marosi Nagy’s book; there is not a single trace of references to the work or reviews of it in journals, perhaps precisely because Marosi Nagy was considered a complete outsider.

The threads come together

In November 1934, a brief article in the Magyar Hírlap first revealed that the earlier film project and the book had converged. The newspaper writes that

“Dénes Marosi Nagy presented his book and the massive drawings prepared for the film adaptation to the leading figures of Hungarian economic and political life and took them to Rome as well, where the director of the League of Nations’ film institute in Rome gave a very favorable opinion of the author’s plan. Mussolini also viewed the graphics”.

The same news appeared in numerous other versions in the domestic press over the following weeks. Other bits of information can also be gleaned from these promotional news items, which were evidently initiated by Maros Nagy. The educational institution in question was reportedly the Instituto L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa (LUCE), which still exists today and which at the time was specifically engaged in the production of fascist propaganda films. Its president was Luciano de Feo. Marosi Nagy even hinted that, contrary to the earlier version, not only was the film project well-received, but an agreement had also been reached with LUCE to produce animated films in the near future. We can also learn from the news that Archduke Joseph and the governor (for some reason, nowhere is it specified that this is Miklós Horthy) are said to be enthusiastic supporters of the film project.

According to another account, Mussolini had even read(!) the film proposal, and LUCE would have covered the entire cost of production provided they received “the moral approval of the Hungarian state.” The report, likely dictated by Marosi Nagy, laments that this request had been pending with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for months, yet Marosi Nagy had still failed to secure the recommendation.

After this, news about the film suddenly stops for a long time and is never heard of again until 1945. It is unclear what became of the film project. The Italian press of the time is unaware of this story. Since the entire history is presumably known only from a single source, Marosi Nagy, the information that has surfaced should be treated with caution, especially since it has appeared in multiple versions from the outset.

It is also conceivable that Marosi Nagy, having already patented his film project in 1931, was unable to find financial support for it in Hungary for a long time, and therefore sought to attract the attention of potential domestic patrons by throwing in the name of a true heavyweight—and at that time, there was only one bigger name in Europe than Mussolini’s. We do not know for certain. However, Marosi Nagy was not considered an important figure even among economic writers, and economic literature has not cited his articles or later books either then or since.

Finally, in 1945, after World War II, he made another attempt to bring his film project to fruition. The newspaper Budai Polgár published a brief interview with him about the film. He attributed the failure of his earlier film project to the fascist regime, but concluded the interview by noting that he had already approached the United Nations with the film project, and that the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs was looking into it. After that, Marosi Nagy and his film disappears from the Hungarian press for good.

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It is almost impossible to overstate Lauren Klein’s influence in the fields of digital humanities and our critical engagement with data and its representation. In connection with her upcoming book, Data by Design, and the online project that preceded it, we discussed, among other things, how she came to this field, the value of questions raised by digital humanities and critical theory in historical research on data visualization, and the important lessons her adventure has provided.

Attila Bátorfy: Looking at your background, you came to the field of digital humanities from comparative literature and computer science. Although it seems very clear to me that someone would also start to deal with the history of graphic representation of data, when and why did you start to take an interest in historical questions? What was your experience and insight into historical work at that time?

Lauren F. Klein: This is actually a story that I tell in the first pages of Data by Design! I had just finished up my first year of teaching at Georgia Tech, and I was thinking ahead to the courses I might teach the next year. While I had been hired to teach courses in early American literature, which was the focus of my PhD (long story, probably for a different interview), my students were so clearly much more interested in science and technology, and pretty much anything applied.

This was in the early 2010s. So the first version of D3 had just been released. Nick Felton (of the Feltron Reports) had become a kind of folk hero, at least in my nerdy corner of the internet. Jer Thorp had just started Eyeo. Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg had recently released their Wind Map. So there was just a lot of excitement about visualization at that time.

I knew from Edward Tufte that visualization had a longer history, and that it coincided with the time period that I’d spent all of my time in grad school learning about, so I decided that I’d try to teach a course about historical data visualization. The idea was that students would learn about the history of visualization and its various contexts–intellectual, cultural, political, and so on–since these were the very same contexts that surrounded the literature of the time. But instead of focusing on novels and essays, we’d focus on charts. And instead of writing essays, the students would create visualizations of their own. So that was the start.

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But then I had to learn enough about the history of visualization to be able to teach the class! So that was what took me from Tufte to William Playfair, and from there, I just kept on going. I read as much as I could on the subject. I applied for fellowships to visit archives with large collections of historical charts. (This is how scholars in the humanities conduct their research.) And while I knew in the abstract that there was so much more to the history of visualization than people like Playfair, it was another thing to see it. For example, this bonkers flow chart of the signers of the US Declaration of Independence, from 1858, that you could evidently send away for a copy in the mail.

What approaches and methods from the humanities can be brought into historical research that are not typically characteristic of this field?

I love this question, because it’s in many ways the whole point of Data by Design. Most people tend to think of historical research as a process of discovery, and there’s a component of that for sure. There are always new things to be found. For example, that chart right up there! But a lot of the work that I do–and, to be honest, the work that I think I’m best at doing–isn’t about discovering an entirely new historical artifact. It’s about telling a new story about an artifact–or, the case of Data by Design, about the history of visualization as a field–that makes you see the thing you thought you knew in ways you never have before.

Sometimes this change in perspective emerges through detailed visual analysis. For example, I spent a lot of time in the book talking about one of Playfair’s engraving errors, where his hand slipped and he had to redo one of the data lines. To me this underscores the point that his visualizations were not these models of accuracy and objectivity that they are often believed to be. But sometimes this perspective emerges through the methods of storytelling themselves. For example, in the chapter that I have about W.E.B. Du Bois and the Atlanta University students who helped him to create his charts, I use a technique called critical fabulation, which is a well-known method in the humanities for dealing with incomplete historical evidence. It was developed by Saidiya Hartman in relation to the archive of slavery, which is characterized by some of the most frustratingly incomplete (and also deeply upsetting) collections of evidence about the past. What Hartman first theorizes about, and then demonstrates, is how you can weave even the most fragmentary evidence into a new story. The goal is to conjure a sense of the lives of the people you wish you knew more about, while also holding space for the things about them that we–in the present–can no longer know.

In the visualization community, there’s been an increasing acknowledgement of the role of Du Bois’s students in creating the charts. But because we don’t have any of them on the record saying, “It was me in that classroom and I was the one holding that jar of red paint,” there hasn’t been much progress in expanding our understanding of the nature of their contributions. This is exactly the type of scenario where critical fabulation comes in, because there is so much contextual evidence that we can use to conjure a sense of their contributions–course descriptions, census records, even what the weather was like on their first day of class. So what I try to do in that chapter is tell a new story about the charts that makes us see them in a way they’ve never been seen before. I don’t really advertise it as a Humanities Method, but a major goal of that chapter (and, as I came to see it as I finished the book, the project overall) is to showcase the truly transformative things that humanities methods can do.

Your first well-known project for the general public was Shape of History, which processed Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s visualization method. Unfortunately, the website is no longer active. How did Peabody’s method differ from that of Antoni Jazwinski from Poland? And why do you call Peabody’s work feminist data visualization?

I do have an archive of that site and I will put it back up some day. I promise! But as you’ve suggested with your question, Peabody’s actual method was not that different from Jazwinski’s. If you compare the instructions that each provides about their method, the primary difference is that Peabody had very strong opinions about the specific colors that should be employed. She went so far as to recommend a specific brand of paint. But the far more meaningful difference as I see it, and the reason why I’ve called her approach a form of feminist data visualization, is how she understands the role of visualization in relation to the larger knowledge-making process.

If you’re familiar with the standard visualization reference model, it depicts a linear process of moving from data, to visualization, and then through some different views of the visualization, and on to insight. The model represents the process of knowledge production as a closed system, and this is aligned with the dominant, positivist view (in visualization research) of how knowledge is made. But when Peabody talks about the uses of visualization, she describes it as a tool in a much larger process of knowledge-making.

Her process also includes aspects of narrative–for example, each viewer is supposed to tell themselves a story about what the various colors and forms suggest, and they’re also supposed to honor the feelings that the images prompt. Both this emphasis on feelings, and the explicit invitation to interpret the charts, are strongly aligned with what scholars today would recognize as a feminist approach to knowledge-making–the idea that there’s not a single definitive source of knowledge, but that each person brings their own perspective and ways of knowing to the topic at hand. Coupled with the fact that Peabody was continually experimenting with her pedagogical process–for example, at times encouraging her students (who, I should have mentioned, were the people she designed her charts for) to create the charts that they would then study; and at other times creating large-scale versions of the charts so that students could experience the charts with their whole bodies, to me confirms how she had an understanding of knowledge production that was very different than, for example, William Playfair, who understood the value of his charts as offering stable and enduring evidence of an underlying truth.

Over the past few years (actually for more than a decade), you have been working continuously with your colleagues on the Data by Design project, which is a strong statement on the counterhistory of data visualization. Tell us about its background!

Of course! Data by Design is both a book and a website (you can actually check out the dev site right now), and both are coauthored by eleven other people: Tanvi Sharma, Jay Varner, Margy Adams, Shiyao Li, Nicholas Yang, Dan Jutan, Jianing Fu, Anna Mola, Zhou Fang, Yang Li, and Silas Munro.

The idea for this project also came from my time at Georgia Tech. I was starting to get interested in the history of data visualization, as I mentioned up above, and at that point–this was 2012 or 2013 or so–there was not yet a scholarly treatment of the history of the field. So I decided to write one. But because I was at Georgia Tech, and I had this amazing team of computer science and interaction design students working with me in my research group, I decided to see if I could tell this new history of data visualization using data visualization.

The idea was that I would do the historical and archival research, and come up with the argument of each chapter. And then I would work with my students to translate that argument into visual or interactive form. In some cases, what resulted was a scrollytell-style walkthrough of a particularly meaningful historical chart. In other cases, as in the chapter on Peabody, we ended up digitally recreating her visualization scheme. And in yet others–and this was by far the most intellectually challenging part of the process–we asked ourselves how the arguments we were making about the historical charts could change contemporary design practice.

In the end, this is probably the most meaningful part of the project for me. It’s so easy to write off historical scholarship as only relevant to our understanding of the past–or, for that matter, to write off humanities scholarship as only relevant to humanities scholars. But humanities scholarship is so so generative. People who know my work from Data Feminism have seen contemporary evidence of this claim, and Data by Design is, in many ways, its historical complement. I want everyone to be able to see how these historical arguments aren’t just relevant to charts made hundreds of years ago; they also open up wholly new ways of thinking about visualization in the present.

In some phases of the project, outsiders were also allowed to comment on it, which was unusual. Were there any insights that were specifically incorporated into the final version?

Everyone hated the introduction! All along, I’d been thinking that the visualization community still needed a direct rejoinder to the canonical history of the field, which is characterized by a few great men (and one woman). You don’t need me to name them. You know exactly who they are. In any case, there is a mode of writing history called counterhistory, perhaps most famously formulated by Michel Foucault (or, some would argue, Nietzsche). The idea is that you pick a set of examples that are directly contemporaneous with the canonical ones, but that come from different perspectives–usually marginalized ones–and together, the effect is to poke holes in and therefore destabilize the dominant account. Initially, it seemed to me that this precise form of counterhistory was what the field desperately needed. But almost every single person in the community review responded in a very negative way.

For the visualization designers and researchers, it was that the field had already moved on from this narrative of founders and fathers, and my pinning the history of the field to this dominant account seemed limiting and retrograde. For the humanities scholars, they were baffled as to why I would even want to engage with this dominant history at all, since the trend in the humanities–at this point over decades–has been to center marginalized people and voices. So I ended up rewriting the entire intro from scratch. It was totally the right call, because it made the project much more forward-thinking and expansive, but I never would have gotten there without the clarity and honesty of the readers of that public draft.

The Introduction to the project can also be understood as a kind of program. Many of its statements are similar to the observations of critical media studies and critical data studies. Let’s start with those first. Why is it necessary to apply some aspects of critical theory (although you yourself do not use this term in the Introduction) and Foucauldian analysis to our historical thinking of data visualization?

Ha! Thank you for recognizing my Foucauldian analysis, which is still very much part of the conceptual framework for the book. I think I’ve answered this a little already, but I’ll just offer one more example from the project that comes from the chapter of the book about people and their relation to visualization practice. The chapter focuses on a set of maps made by Shanawdithit, who was a Beothuk woman who lived in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Her maps have been celebrated–deservedly so–as exemplary of Indigenous mapping practice. But the thing is that she created her maps in the final months of her life, while she herself was being held captive by the Scottish-Canadian explorer and ethnographer who was studying her people. He was the one who gave her the paper and pencils she used to create her maps, and he was the one who told her to draw them. To me, this is a very visceral example of how visualizations–not just hers but all of them–are always created in a particular context. And when we incorporate our knowledge of this context into our understanding of the charts, we understand more and not less about them.

This is really important to underscore. People outside of the humanities often interpret the “critical” part of critical theory, or critical data studies, or what have you, as purely negative. To be sure, humanistic critique does often expose a lot of negative implications that would be easier to ignore–the story of Shanawdithit being one such example. But at its best, critique is one of the most generative intellectual tools that we have. I believe this to my core.

Critique contributes additional context and additional complexity. And both of these, in turn, allow us to ask additional questions–about the meaning of the charts, like Shanawdithit’s, that we thought we fully knew, and about what we might do differently moving forward. In the case of Shanawdithit and her maps, the expanded story of their creation really drives home the point about the dangers of extracting knowledge from its source. It encourages us, in the present, to think about how we might better connect the data that we use in our work to the people who helped to create it. And more generally, it serves as a reminder of how quick–too quick–we often are to remove our data from the context of its creation, and of the consequences of not pausing to think about that step.

The question may arise as to whether critical theory does not demand things from hundred- or two-hundred-year-old representations that their creators had no idea about? For example, can we expect representations from 200 years ago to take into account contemporary morality, or the issue of racism (as previously raised in relation to Hegel and Kant), or should Playfair have been aware that his diagrams will be used as the visual language of capitalism too? In other words, these representations are images of power.

I hope the example I’ve just discussed has already begun to answer this. Certainly, there are some historical figures who had deeply questionable morality, and despicable views about race. But to me–and, for that matter, for most humanities scholars–the main point is not to judge the actual individuals and their opinions post hoc. The goal is to use these individuals and their charts and their writing to better understand the views of the time–because in many cases these views serve as the source of ideas that are still in circulation today.

I have a feeling that we don’t know what to do with the problems of modernity and Enlightenment. You also introduce the essay with indigenous mapping and data practices, and it is an increasingly widespread view that the desire for data representation is independent of era and culture. Regardless of this, we still deal much less with practices that predate European and Western colonialism and globalization. What do you think is the reason for this?

This is a really important question, and a giant one. It’s probably better to read the introduction to the book where I explore some of the issues around the Enlightenment and modernity with more depth and care. But one thing I’ll maybe highlight here, since I don’t talk about it in the book–at least not that I remember–is the role of what Lorraine Daston, the philosopher of science, calls “epistemic virtues.” These are features or qualities associated with the pursuit of knowledge or truth (this is the “epistemic” part) that are also, at the same time, implicitly presumed to be ethical or good (this is the “virtue” part). Visualization, as it is generally understood in a Western context, is defined by so many of these epistemic virtues–clarity, efficiency, even the reliance on vision itself–so when we (people trained up in Europe and North America) go looking for additional examples of visualization, especially from outside of those places, it’s both harder to find examples that adhere to these virtues–since they are themselves place and context-specific–and harder for those of us (again to be very explicit: people trained up in the West) to even recognize good examples of ways of doing visualization differently. This ends up reinforcing a narrow view of what “good” visualization entails.

In Data by Design, I wanted to acknowledge the wide range of visualization practices that exist in the world, but I also wanted to anchor the project in my own scholarly expertise, which does happen to be in the Enlightenment and its intellectual, cultural, and political legacy. The introduction is probably the most expansive part of the book in terms of its geographical scope, and that’s very deliberate. But I also wanted to make clear that I was not claiming to tell a universal history of all visualizations that had ever been designed. We were also not the right team to undertake a true decolonial history, as our team did not include any Indigenous team members. We talk about this explicitly in the “People” chapter of the book. There is still so much more space for additional stories about visualization and other data practices rooted in all the other intellectual traditions that exist in the world, and I can’t wait to read those books too.

Data by Design will also be published as a book by MIT Press in the fall of 2026. Why did you feel the need to publish it in print? How will its content differ from the online project?

I’ve built enough websites to know that it’s very difficult to keep them current and functional for more than a few years. So when MIT offered to publish Data by Design as a book, it was an immediate “yes.” Books endure. But we did face a challenge of figuring out how to make the book its own unique object, and not just a bunch of words with the occasional screenshot off to the side.

A few years into the project, I’d hired the design firm Polymode to help me with the concept for the website. Conveniently, Polymode does a lot of print work as well. So for the past year or so, my DH Lab team–and our lead designer, Tanvi Sharma, in particular–has been working with Silas Munro from Polymode to figure out how to creatively adapt all of the interactive features from the website into print form. One of our guiding principles has been to resist the impulse to replicate the website wholesale. Rather, we’ve pushed ourselves to think hard about the unique affordances of print–color, typography, sequence, and scale–and how we might enlist those in the service of the book’s argument. I’m reviewing the page proofs right now and I cannot wait for everyone to see the book. It looks amazing!

What were the most important lessons you learned from the project?

There were so many, and they keep on coming! But maybe one I’ll highlight is the value of true interdisciplinary collaboration and expertise. This is the longest project that I’ve ever worked on, as well as the one with the most people. It’s involved students and professionals from the fields of data visualization (and computer science more broadly), visualization design (and graphic design more broadly), literary studies (and the humanities more broadly), and more. It’s so clear to me now, as we approach the end, that this project could not have reached its finished form without every single member of the team. I mean this both practically and substantively. It’s a much richer project because of the wide range of disciplines represented, and also a much better one. But it only worked because of the mutual respect we had for each others’ training and forms of expertise. I wish more people could share in an experience like this, because it’s such an important reminder of what we all gain by contributing to our collective knowledge.

What prospects do you see for this counterhistory becoming part of the discourse on the history of data visualization?

That’s always been a major goal for me. When I rewrote the introduction last year, I envisioned it as a chapter that could be assigned in an introductory visualization course, as well as one that a practicing designer would find informative and enjoyable to read. Those, to me, are the two major groups that have the power to expand the discourse. I guess we’ll find out in October if it worked!

Are there any other areas in the past or historical issues you would like to explore in the future?

I’ve been so focused on this project for the past several years that I haven’t done as much actual archival work as I usually do. So one of the things I’m looking forward to is returning to the archive–and probably more textual material, if I’m being honest. Visualizing text, especially at scale, remains a wide open research area–at least in my view. So maybe I’ll spend a bit more time there?

You can’t avoid the question either: what are the five most important data visualizations or information graphics of all time? One of them cannot be English, American, German, or French!

Conveniently, my book has six central images, which structure each of the chapters, and everyone already knows about William Playfair, which structures Chapter Two. So I’ll point you to the five others:

• Creator once known, “Mapa de Teozacoalco” (1581)

• Plymouth Committee of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, “Plan of an African Ship’s Lower Deck with Negroes in the Proportion of Only One to a Ton” (1788)

• Shanawdithit, “The Kidnapping of Demasduit at Beothuk Lake, March 5, 1819, and Captain Buchan’s Visit to Beothuk Lake in January 1811” (1829)

• Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, from A Chronological History of the United States (1856)

• W.E.B. Du Bois and the students of Atlanta University, “A series of statistical charts illustrating the condition of the descendants of former African slaves now in residence in the United States of America” (1900)

About Lauren Klein

Lauren Klein is Professor of Data & Decision Sciences and English at Emory University, where she also directs the Digital Humanities Lab and the Atlanta Interdisciplinary AI Network. Her research brings together computational and critical methods to explore questions of gender, race, and justice, both in early America and today. Klein is the author (with Catherine D’Ignazio) of the award-winning Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020), and the editor (with Matthew K. Gold) of Debates in the Digital Humanities (Univ. of Minnesota Press), among other books and papers. Her next book, Data by Design: Visualization and Power from Abolition to the Dawn of Data Science, is forthcoming from the MIT Press in Fall 2026.

The previous interviews in the series

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Most of my readers are probably familiar with the legendary Wurzelatlas by Austrian botanists Lore Kutschera (1907–2008) and Erwin Lichtenegger (1928–2004) (later joined by Monika Sobotik, 1941–), which has seen several editions and expansions since 1960. Fortunately, Wageningen University has digitized nearly 1200 of the atlases’ original illustrations, which are available at this link.

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Fewer people are aware, however, that the Wurzelatlas series had an American predecessor: The botanist John Ernst Weaver’s (1884–1966) and his colleagues’ research, which focused primarily on Nebraska, US, and the books that resulted from it. Most of Weaver’s work has also been digitized. The majority of these works, including his journal papers, are available on the University of Nebraska Library’s website, as well as his monographs on Archive.org and the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Weaver did not merely draw side and top views of roots. His books and articles also contain numerous graphs, diagrams, quadrat drawings of the patterns of plant coexistence, and other illustrations.

Below, I’ll share a few of my favourites, but I hope everyone enjoys browsing—there’s plenty to choose from. I made some graphical adjustments to some of the drawings; for example, I merged the roots that were split in two pages and removed the book’s fold from the view.

It would be absolutely fantastic if the University of Nebraska were to put together a special collection of Weaver’s drawings. But I can also imagine someone—and, of course, Nicholas Rougeux comes to mind again—adapting Weaver’s works in a contemporary way.

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Ten years later, the Atlas of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (Атлас Чорнобильської зони відчуження) was published in the independent Ukraine. I was fortunate to see the large-format, 20 pages atlas in person many years ago at the OSA-Blinken Archive, and I’ve been looking for a digitized version for a long time. Fortunately, someone uploaded it as a PDF to the Ecogisstorage portal.

The foreword to the atlas by professor Vyacheslav M. Shestopalov reveals that this was the first major attempt to map the disaster’s radioactive impact on wildlife, soil, and air. A large number of scientists participated in the work, representing both the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and numerous research institutes under the Ministry of Ukraine for the Protection of the Population from the Consequences of the Chernobyl NPP Accident.

Since the 1996 atlas, of course, numerous other atlases on Chernobyl have been published. Disaster mapping has become very popular over the past thirty years (A few years ago, we also created an online atlas of earthquakes), but what came before that? Are you aware of any atlases from before 1950, that specifically dealt with natural or man-made disasters?

Reading through the Cabinet, I often found myself wondering what I would find if I asked the same questions of India. Is there a distinct tradition of Indian data visualization? Identifying what even constitutes an “Indian” graphic is also an immediate hurdle. Historically, our most graphically expressive documents have been censuses. You can look as far back as 1871 and find choropleth maps tracking demographics, dense text and tables, and even Florence Nightingale’s illustrated observations on sanitation in British India. Yet, these graphics didn’t fully answer my question because they were produced by a colonial administration. They are undeniably a core part of our historical legacy because they laid the foundation for how a post-independence India would classify its people, but they were visualizations made not by or for them.

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Thus, the search went on, examining the censuses conducted following India’s 1947 independence. Early independent censuses, like 1951 and 1961, didn’t show anything very interesting. But 1971 was a very different story, because my searches also turned up a bunch of documents I hadn’t seen before. Together with its customary, frighteningly dry census volumes, the Indian government released something in 1971 and 1981 that was essentially unprecedented.

Titled A Portrait of Population, these were state-specific booklets written in plain language and illustrated with hand-drawn charts, maps, pictograms, and photographs. They were designed not for researchers, scientists, or bureaucrats, but for ordinary readers. Students, curious citizens, anyone! People who would never, under normal circumstances, pick up a census report.

Each booklet shared a common foreword that stated that ambition clearly:

“This attempt to produce a popular version of the large census data for the general reader is an important innovation.”

Oh boy. I am unable to accurately express my enthusiasm, mainly due to my years of experience with modern government websites, portals, and documents, which have left me jaded. Their lack of accessibility—both technical and textual—has thwarted people like me at every turn. However, the government had prepared something for us, the lowly readers, right here? They actively wanted people to understand this data as clearly as possible? Get outta here! And so I began collecting each one of these I could find.

Each state office had relied on its own artists, draughtsmen, and cartographers. And I suppose since there were no shared tools, no default templates, and no software nudging everyone toward the same visual outputs, what they produced was genuinely distinct. Kerala’s charts look different from Odisha’s. Arunachal Pradesh’s colourful graphics have different sensibility than Gujarat’s. Some graphics are minimal line charts; others are elaborate pictograms. The most inventive ones abandon “data-viz” entirely, like dependency ratios rendered as literal illustrations of human figures stacked and balancing to show who supports whom in the economy.

This is an interesting find, but nothing that happens in government happens without a reason. Least of all something of this scale, which required dedicating not-insignificant human resources within departments that already had more than enough on their plates. Why did they bother? What exactly made it necessary to produce these documents in 1971? So we zoomed out to look at the other things being talked about within the government at the time.

The 1960s and 70s were defined by a global panic over population growth. Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb and The Limits to Growth which followed shortly after forecasted civilizational collapse due to unchecked growth. The UN would declare 1974 the World Population Year.

Wheels were also in motion in India to meet this agenda. In the 70s, this played out in some incredibly dark ways, most notably a mass forced-sterilization program that affected over eight million people in a single year mostly minorities across religion and the social strata. But this same anxiety also produced a parallel effort in education to help young people understand demographic concepts before they became, as the government essentially viewed it, the population problem themselves. In 1969, India’s Home Minister Y. B. Chavan put the challenge to census officials right before it began: How do you make this data interesting and educational to the common man? How do you make it attractive enough to read? The Portrait of Population series was, in part, the answer.

Government work doesn’t happen in silos, and different departments will work together towards a common goal in their own unique ways. Around the same time, people started to take demographic studies and research more seriously. Students and teachers needed to be given the tools they needed to understand and teach these new ideas in the classroom. Interestingly, data visualization was explicitly acknowledged as a critical component of this school’s curriculum. Official government syllabus documents from the period mandated that students develop the ability to “interpret simple line graphs, bar graphs, or pictograms” and present population data in “tabular, diagrammatic, pictorial and symbolic form.” In this way, visual literacy was beginning to be planned directly into the curriculum. It is difficult to say how successful this was, but it explains why the government would also want to publish official census booklets filled with graphics.

That era did not last long. By 1991, the Office of the Registrar General was already running workshops to train its cartographers in digital mapping and computer-assisted design, and the Portrait of Population series began to thin out. I can’t say for certain how digital tools changed the aesthetic because public copies from this period are hard to find. It’s reasonable to assume that as the government prioritized software-driven efficiency, these high-effort booklets simply fell off the priority list. This leaves us with a twenty-year window of hand-drawn Indian data visualization before software would nudge us all in one conventional, neater direction.

At Diagram Chasing, we extracted, categorized, and tagged nearly 700 of these visualizations. We have organized them by state, by chart type, and by visual similarity. The full, interactive archive is available in our explorer, and all the original booklets can be read in full on the Internet Archive. We’ve also got a longer, illustrated story about it that you might enjoy reading!

Aman Bhargava

Aman Bhargava is a developer, independent researcher, and chart maker. He specializes in civic tech and data visualization, with bylines in Reuters, Rest of World, and Unearthed by Greenpeace. He also co-runs Diagram Chasing, which is an independent data publication and community dedicated to turning Indian public data into compelling, visual stories and tools.

Other posts from the history of Asian dataviz

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My wife and son spent the past week in The Hague visiting a friend. So I browsed the local antique bookstores and museums to see what kind of souvenirs they might bring me back. The Hague is important to our dataviz history because Otto and Marie Neurath, and Gerd Arntz spent part of their exile here. In Hague they founded the ISOTYPE company, and Otto Neurath founded the Mundaneum Institute (with the permission of Paul Otlet). The local Kunstmuseum houses a significant portion of Gerd Arntz’s graphic estate. So I was excited to see what I’d find from the Netherlands this week!

I didn’t know much about the history of Dutch data visualization, even though it seemed interesting based on Marieke Gelderblom’s research on the 19th century beginnings. So I set out my search in three places: the Geheugen image archive, the historical archive of the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics, and the Delpher digital library. I did find some interesting graphics, diagrams, and maps, but I also found a truly unique piece on Delpher: De wereld in rechte lijnen (The world in straight lines), an oblong mini-atlas/manual by D. E. (Derk Everts?) Zuidhof published in Haarlem, 1931. The publisher was the prestigious Joh. Enschede company, known for its high quality printing works.

The goal of the atlas

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the discipline of cartography—and particularly its application within the sphere of primary and secondary education—was characterized by a rigid and largely unquestioned adherence to topographic realism. The primary, overriding objective of the educational school atlas was the exact, mimetic reproduction of the physical world. Mapmakers and educational publishers prioritized the precise delineation of coastal contours, the intricate, fractal meandering of river systems, and the exhaustive detailing of complex political boundaries. Against this highly positivist backdrop, the publication of the atlas De wereld in rechte lijnen in 1931 represents a radical, and ultimately suppressed departure from established cartography.

Zuidhof, a figure with a mysterious background about whom I haven’t been able to find out substantial information (maybe he was son/grandson of Derk Everts Zuidhof, an author and schoolteacher in the mid 19th century), writes the following in the introduction:

“It is repeatedly complained that young people lack a somewhat adequate understanding of maps, that they have no clear grasp of, for example, location, boundaries, size, direction, distance, number of inhabitants, population density, sea depths, seabed elevations, etc., etc. In my opinion, the cause of this lies in the fact that, in earlier years, the foundation for this was neglected in primary schools. While various of these subjects are discussed in passing, the necessary care is not devoted to them. Through a visual representation, various of these matters should be presented so simply that they make a lasting impression on the child’s soul and can never disappear from it. The accompanying map work is an attempt in this direction. It aims, therefore, to truly fill a void; primarily among today’s youth, and furthermore among the more mature youth and the elderly. May it find its way into schools (for young and old), onto the desk of the one who reads his newspaper attentively, into offices, and onto reading tables.

That this be so is the wish of the designer.”

The diagrams

So what is Zuidhof’s proposal for the simple representation? To simplify borders, geographical features, and topographical elements on a map to such an extent that they can be drawn using only straight lines.

Zuidhof also included instructions along each “Cubist map” on how to construct it from the “original” map view.

After the publication

Fortunately, quite a bit of information about the atlas has survived. For one thing, Zuidhof was not only an enthusiastic proponent of the method, but he also traveled throughout the country giving lectures on the atlas. A report on his promotional work at a conference using eight large sized school charts appeared in the newspaper Nieuwe Leidsche Courant on 12 August 1932.

The other information is that the prestigious, still-existing Uitgeverij Noordhoff publisher actively considered the possibility of taking over the publication rights or financially backing a follow-up edition of Zuidhof's modernist atlas for wider, commercially viable distribution. However, to evaluate the pedagogical viability, scientific validity, and commercial potential of these highly unusual schematic diagrams, Noordhoff’s executives sought the professional, external advice of “the elder statesman of Dutch cartography”, author of many school atlases, K. Zeeman. In the description of Zwiggelar Auction House, which estimated the atlas’ value between EUR 65–130, we can read, that Zeeman found Zuidhof’s diagrams ridiculous and advised against its wider distribution. According to the auction house’s information, Zeeman answered the following:

“I cannot recommend this publication; some 25 years ago a similar cubist publication also appeared; it disappeared without a trace. At most, you might get a few good reviews from fanatical reviewers. Thus I have settled the matter with Mr. Zuidhof in writing; you will not be bothered by him anymore regarding this publication.”

Unfortunately, I don’t know yet which cubist atlas from 25 years earlier Zeeman is referring to in his answer.

If we look at the stylistic influences of the atlas, it is indeed not difficult to see the influence of cubism, as well as that of the Dutch De Stijl group (Theo van Doesburg, Piet Mondrian, etc.). At the same time, as Zeeman also refers to it, attempts had already been made to simplify maps and reduce them to basic geometric shapes. See for instance Émile Levasseur’s cartogram proposed at the 1876 Budapest Statistical Congress.

We also know previous English, Hungarian and German examples for squaring the actual administrative borders.

Regardless of these earlier examples, Zuidhof’s radical, Cubist-geometric approach can be described as unique and was driven by a concept quite different from that of his predecessors. Since it was forgotten for a long time even in the Netherlands, it is difficult to demonstrate its impact. His 3D scaling solution later appears in the work of Erwin Raisz.

And to round out this story: In 2017, Dutch visual artist John Körmeling created a digital conceptual light-art-work titled De Wereld in Rechte Lijnen. The artwork was commissioned for the renovation of the Dutch National Archives building and was installed on its facade. The National Archives is located in The Hague.

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The book explores how, over the past 150 years, Hungarian statisticians, economists, engineers, doctors, journalists, graphic artist, and politicians have viewed the graphic presentation of data, what they wrote about it, which aspects they emphasized, and what they considered its advantages and disadvantages.

The backbone of the book consists of more than thirty excerpts of varying lengths, presented in chronological order. I have written a longer introductory, analytical essay and an epilogue to these writings, and the texts are also accompanied by more than forty images and three hundred notes.

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What’s the point of all this?

For quite some time now, I’ve been interested in what kind of knowledge base Hungarian scholars and experts who worked on and wrote about the graphic presentation of data actually possessed. What did they read and know, where did they get their examples, and what inspired them? And finally, how did they pass on this knowledge? On the other hand, I was also interested in how and when new theories, insights, perspectives, and findings from the international literature were incorporated into Hungarian-language publications.

When RJ Andrews launched his “Summer of Clarity” series on Chartography last summer, focusing on classic English/Scottish (Playfair) American (Brinton/Hubbard, Karsten), French (Barbeu-Dubourg, Minard, Levasseur) and German (Mayr, Auerbach) manuals and handbook on data graphics, I finally decided to compile all the available Hungarian resources.

Collecting and selecting the texts was an exciting task in itself. In addition to numerous texts already known from earlier sources, there are many that truly had to be unearthed from the depths of oblivion.

Who spoke?

One of the most interesting findings of the analysis is how differently people in different professions wrote about data graphics.

The tendency to overlook the broader connections between (image) theory and visual culture in general, as well as epistemology and ideology is particularly evident among generations of statisticians and economists. Their focus is on methodology, precision, practicality, clarity, the description of diagram types, and their classification. This is understandable from the perspective that these texts are primarily addressed to current and future professionals in the field, as representatives of a closed scientific profession. Their writings are produced for a narrow professional/academic audience, and their quality is measured according to the standards and expectations of that specific audience. Thus, the recognition and emphasis that normative practice itself is not merely a matter of technical knowledge, but has numerous meanings, cultural contexts, and interpretive possibilities, does not appear in their work.

Although differences in perspective between various professions are also evident in the international literature: initially, German, French, and somewhat later American statistical/engineering and business literature was far more goal-oriented and focused on use and application. Of course, starting in the 1960s, this shifted towards a more theoretical direction, first under the influence of French and American semiotics, and later under the influence of various, primarily German and American image theories. The statistical-mathematical and accounting-based normative tradition was enriched (or, according to others, loosened) from the practical side by the partly pragmatic, partly communicative-rhetorical, and partly aesthetic perspectives of graphic designers and journalists. It is also worth noting that none of the statisticians and economists who discussed data graphics in their writings—with a few exceptions—created data graphics or maps. In their works, simple diagrams and statistical maps appear only sporadically, and often they did not even create them themselves. This is precisely why one might get the impression that these authors wrote about graphic methods only out of necessity. While they did not reject the graphic presentation of data, they by no means considered its use necessary, and they distinguished between abstract representations and cartograms, as well as pictorial statistical methods. They saw the latter as useful only for educating and informing the uneducated, illiterate and elementary school children.

Looking at the genres, the majority of the texts are methodological descriptions of varying lengths. It is telling that, unlike in the international literature, no standalone handbook appeared until quite recently—unless we consider György Rejtő’s 1951 or István Klinghammer’s 1975 short booklet as such. Until the 1990s, the graphics, figures and illustrations in manuals and statistical books were black and white, which, in addition to technological and financial constraints, may also reflect the field’s status as well as publishers’ limited enthusiasm.

When they were speaking?

A chronology is useful for determining when certain ideas and trends first appear in Hungarian literature. The overall picture is varied. Strictly statistical literature, with its austere nature, generally keeps pace with international literature. Psychology and the concept of business utility, however, lagged behind American and French literature by twenty to twenty-five years. Conversely, the findings of semiotics and semiology, as well as the emergence of image theory, can be considered early, and critical-ideological discourse also quickly found its way among certain contemporary authors.

This chronological structure, however, also highlights a striking absence: the void of the 1970s and 1980s. This does not mean that no works or articles were published during this period in which we could not have encountered dry descriptions of graphic methods. In fact, the ever-growing number of university lecture notes designed to aid in the teaching of statistics, all dealt with the graphics method. Interestingly, however, the trend in these books had already shifted away from devoting more and more space to the graphical method; authors of the era generally wrote only a few pages about it, in a cookie-cutter style. More significantly, however, no new aspects appear in these books. Yet if there is an era that internationally produced works turning traditional approaches to data graphics on their head, it is precisely this period of just over twenty years.

What did they know?

It is striking that, until quite recently, the majority of authors were either unaware of or did not cite relevant earlier and contemporary international literature. Particularly in light of German scholarship, it is interesting that they ignore the methodological works of Georg von Mayr or Felix Auerbach, which were well known in their time, but they likewise make no mention of the foundational works of the French scholars Étienne-Jules Marey and Émile Levasseur. Later, the absence of the American “business” wave—handbooks incorporating economic analytics, such as the classics by Willard C. Brinton, Karl G. Karsten, Allan C. Haskell, or John R. Riggleman—is remarkable. This is surprising for several reasons. The aforementioned giants of German and French statistics were not only leading figures in the scientific literature, but the Hungarian popular newspapers also regularly reported on their researches. Furthermore, their handbooks were available in the domestic library collections of the time.

Of course, there may be reasons for the lack of citations. One is that in the 19th century, citation practices in scholarly literature were not yet strictly regulated in Hungary, and authors often cited other authors as authorities rather than specific works. Bibliographic references at the end of texts were also relatively rare. Another reason is that authors may have considered certain statements self-evident and did not feel the need to cite the source of established knowledge.

This does not mean that the ideas of these authors did not appear in the works of certain writers. The influence of Georg von Mayr, Karsten, Neurath, later of Jacques Bertin is detectable in many texts. We also have examples, where the reception of Marey or Auerbach occurs sixty to eighty years later.

What kind of discourse did they represent?

In his 2000 book The Infographic. A History of Data Graphics and News Communication, British media researcher Murray Dick identified various schools of thought and discourses in the texts on data visualization that he analyzed. Using Dick’s categories—though with some modifications and additions—it is interesting to examine when and what kinds of discourses appear in these texts.

Don’t worry, everyone—we’ll be back to our regular schedule. We’ll have a piece on meat trade, on elections coming up soon, and we’ll also be featuring a special atlas too.

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The 1915 Atlas and Plat Book of Ringgold County, (publisher: Mount Ayr Record-News) digitized by the University of Iowa Library, contains not only county and town maps but also charts of animal anatomy (for Michael Stoll’s attention!). What interests me more right now are the pages of pictograms showing the proportions of the nutritive ingredients (water, protein, fat, carbohydrates, ash) different food types, like cereals, meat, vegetables, dairy products, fruits.

The purpose of these charts is, on the one hand, to illustrate the nutritional composition of various foods and compare it to the “composition” of the human body, and on the other hand—although there are no charts for this, just tables—to highlight the fact that, generally speaking, the more calorie-dense a food is, the cheaper it tends to be.

Obviously, there’s nothing special about these pictograms, and I can just picture a statistician or an engineer having a heart attack the moment they see them. At the same time, let’s not forget that this was created for a county atlas with educational purposes in mind.

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Between 1901 and 1915, the Ministry of Trade and Commerce published five annual reports on the state of industrial education nationwide. The maps in the report covering the years 1902–1905, published in 1906, and in the subsequent reports published in 1909 and 1912, were drawn by the Ministerial Advisor for Industrial Affairs, Director General, later City Clerk of Budapest, and incidentally an amateur literary critic, Andor Gyula Zulawski (1867–1936). As a literary critic Zulawski was a conservative-nationalist, he accused the poet Endre Ady of spreading moral Bolshevism and blamed Mihály Babits’s poems for the Treaty of Trianon.

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On the maps, Zulawski was tasked with illustrating the locations, numbers, and diversity of industrial education institutions according to their operators and specializations. Even on the 1906 map, it is clear that this task exceeded Zulawski’s capabilities; the colour map appears at once naive, cluttered, and illegible. However, as the range of schools offering industrial education continued to expand in the following years, the challenges to solve became more complex than the 1906 version.

On the 1909 and 1912 maps, Zulawski had to show a total of thirty-nine categories based on the type of operators and the school’s specialization. Thus, on the map, we can see thirty-nine different shapes and colours.

Zulawski would highlight the individual vocational education centers using a sort of “packed circles” method. Unfortunately the legend does not clarify what determines the size of the enclosed symbols. It makes sense to represent a large number of categories with colours or symbols only if their distribution forms a distinct pattern; however, Zulawski’s maps show that the distribution of the various school types does not form such a pattern. It would also be extremely difficult to represent this diversity and density in an interactive, filterable way.

Despite all this, Zulawski nevertheless tried to impose a kind of order on the chaos through the use of circles for packing. Thus, the idea itself is a precursor to the hierarchical circular packing method that is popular today.

To the best of my knowledge, circle packing method of hierarchical data was first presented in 2006 at the Association for Computing Machinery’s CHI conference in Montreal by Weixin Wang and his colleagues.

I certainly don’t claim that Zulawski’s idea is the same as Wangs’ solution, if only because Zulawski wasn’t interested in resolving hierarchies.

What is the lesson here? Zulawski was clearly neither a cartographer nor a graphic designer, yet he attempted to bring order to a multitude of categories and colours. His maps reveal a process of development, as well as the fact that, as the number of categories increased, the method he devised also reached its limits.

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Little is known about the life of Imre Milecz (sometimes Miletz, Latinized as Emericus, Emerici, Germanized as Emerich, 1738–1800) and his family (his brother? György, Georgius was cartographer too), although he is credited with creating numerous maps, either independently or in collaboration with others. Milecz was a chamber engineer and cartographer, attended the Piarist Collegium Oeconomicum in Szenc (now Senec, Slovakia) and was a student of Sámuel Mikoviny, one of the most important Hungarian mapmaker of the 18th century.

In 1773, Milecz published the hand drawn and coloured Mappa Regni Hungariae demonstrans universas caeo regias salis stationes, Regnis Hungariae, Croatiae, Sclavoniae, Magno item Principatui Transilvaniae ingremiatas (Map of the Kingdom of Hungary showing all the royal salt works stations belonging to the Kingdoms of Hungary, Croatia, and Slavonia, as well as to the Grand Principality of Transylvania) in Pozsony (now Bratislava, Slovakia). In addition to the map, the complete work also includes data on the salt trade in 1772 in tabular form. The Latin cartouche of the map also says that the map shows “rivers, mountains, and roads laid down partly by survey and partly according to itineraries; in which the boundaries of the provinces are shown, and finally the counties are everywhere distinguished by different colours.” The date of publication is “24th day of March, in the year 1773.”

The most interesting part of the map is that it shows the volume of salt trade on each river with stacked lines. The greater the quantity transported on each river section, the more lines he used to indicate it.

The map sections below, from north to south, show the salt trade volumes of the Váh River, the Danube, the upper section of the Tisza, the lower section of the Tisza, the Maros, and the Sava.

As can be seen, Milecz’s method differs from Harness’s in that Milecz experiments with stacking lines, while Harness uses strips. If Milecz had coloured the space between the outer lines, the end result would have been the same. There will obviously be those who say that the two methods are not the same. There is no record of whether Milecz was aware of the novelty of his method; he makes no mention of it in the map’s cartouche, referring only to routes, itineraries and places.

There are two other versions of Milecz’s map. One was made by Georgius Milecz a month later than the original (which has a date of March, 1773), and the other, with seemingly updated data, was probably made by Imre Milecz himself in 1781.

What have we learned today? One thing is that data graphics can appear at any time that predate what was previously believed to be the first invention. Therefore, we should be much more cautious when using the word “first.” Another is that these innovations in graphic methods do not always come from Western Europe or the US. Scientists, including mathematicians, cartographers, statisticians, economists, all over the world have been concerned with the visual communication of specific problems. It is conceivable that there is an even earlier flow map than Milecz’s.

One addition

A few days after the article was published, I discovered the following map—dated no earlier than 1802—in the digital map collection of the National Széchenyi Library, which also depicts the routes and volumes of the salt trade. The map was based on a postal map published in 1802 by the cartographer and engraver Ferenc Karacs (1770–1838). The creator was clearly familiar with Milecz’s map: its methodology is the same, though it includes new data and quantities.

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Last week I wrote a guest post to the Patterns of Translation about visualizing the history of literature. Here you can read the post.

Patterns of Translation

Visualizing the history of literature

Hello, readers of Patterns of Translation! My name is Attila Bátorfy, I work in information design, I’m behind the Cabinet of Infographic Curiosities substack, and with this article I am responding to a very kind invitation from András and Péter.Thanks for reading…

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6 months ago · 27 likes · 1 comment · Attila Bátorfy

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On DigitaltMuseum, the fantastic Swedish and Norwegian digital heritage site, there are numerous black-and-white photos from the early 1960s to the early 1970s showing people with charts. Most of them come from the Upplandmuseet, Uppsala, a smaller part from the Örebro County Museum. The documentation descriptions of the photos are brief. On the images we can see the microbiologist Ragnar Nilsson, the soil physicist Sigvard Andersson, the psychiatrist Bo Trydegård, but we don’t know who are the others.

We are talking about two types of photos here: one category is in which the person is seen “at work,” explaining something, thus becoming a passive participant in the photo. The other category is photos in which the subject is explicitly posing with the chart for the camera.

Before interpreting them, it is worth noting a few characteristic features at the iconographic level. Based on the autopsy, we can say that most of the photos show men in elegant suits and women in business attire, but there is also a man in a doctor’s coat, a man in military uniform, and a group in casual wear. Only the descriptions of the photos reveal what their occupations might be. Among them there is a psychiatrist, a microbiologist, an engineer, a high-ranking military officer, a local government official, a teacher and an economist. In one group photo, we see advertising executives, and in the other, agriculturists. Not much is known about the locations. There is a roof-raising ceremony, a university library, the advertising professionals are meeting in the throne hall of Uppsala Castle, and there is an outdoor set up. All the others could have been made anywhere. There is another important element in the photos: the index finger has its own role. In nine photos, the persons are pointing at the charts. It can be concluded from the charts that most of them are simple line and column charts, with a few illustrated by figurative elements.

The almost banality of the photos raises the question: who were they made for? What are these basic line graphs and bar charts about? Why those people are explaining them, if they are simple?

Or they highlight precisely the contradiction that, in the public sphere, charts, even the simplest ones - somehow paraphrasing Daniel Rosenberg - loose something from the ontological (as facts) or epistemological (as visual evidences) in their nature, and they transform to rhetorical. Their meaning and importance is conveyed to the public through verbal explanation. Yet it is difficult to say who the main character of these images is. The diagram is both a symbol and an attribute. The diagram represents the “drawn-together” knowledge in the Latourian sense, while also providing the authority of the hard fact for the observer. The diagram in this context not only a “useful image”, but also a “used image”.

If we look at the history of portraits of scientists and works of art depicting “science in work,” or “expertise in work”, a number of clichéd attributes come to mind: measuring instruments, globes, maps, library rooms, anatomical drawings, skulls. But when did graphs and charts become attributes of knowledge, science, expertise, authority and decision? Would the professionals featured in the photos have taken similar photos of their own professions and expertise? Or is it just the photographer who sees them shows them this way because that’s what he/she and the audience expects from an expert?

These photos may be interesting individually, but it is much more worthwhile to examine them together. What are they reflecting on? What happened in Sweden starting in the 1950s (see our previous article The Coolest School Posters from Sweden) that suddenly led to so many photos of “people in front of charts” being taken? How might this be related to the often challenged “Swedish success”, the folkhemmet (the Swedish social democratic/industrial democratic idea of people’s home) concept, the postwar record years (rekordåren), and the Million Program (Miljonprogrammet)? Obviously I have no idea. Were similar photos taken in other countries during this period? Or is it just a coincidence that there are so many such photos in the archives of two Swedish museums? That’s hardly the case; photos like these were definitely taken elsewhere in large quantities. If you know of any, please share them with me.

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The late 19th and early 20th centuries were the golden age of various popular, often mid-sized compendiums, memorandas and encyclopedias aimed at the general public. Examples include Adolphe Ganot’s Natural Philosophy for General Readers and Young Persons, The Scientific American’s Reference Book, and Thomas Hunter’s Self-instructor series. One of the common features of these handy books is that they presented “knowledge” in elaborate graphics and explanatory diagrams.

Richard S. Peale’s Popular Compendium (full title: Popular Compendium of Useful Knowledge Embracing Science, History, Biography and Industrial Statistics Arranged in the Most Attractive and Instructive Form. Illustrated with a Large Number of Colored Charts, Diagrams Constituting a Complete Cyclopedia of Reference) stands out from the works of this era with its diagrammatic extravagance. He presented statistical data in colorful, crowded, sometimes fancy diagrams and charts and catchy pictorial statistics.

Peale’s Popular Educator/Compendium was first published in 1883 in Chicago. It was published every year for the next decade, with its content constantly expanding and its title changing to The Home Library of Useful Knowledge. I use both the 1885 and the 1893 edition. However, it is worth noting that over the years, some of the diagrams have been replaced or redesigned, and also new diagrams have been added to the original series.

Reconstructing a timeline

Peale’s Compendium is linked by its statistical charts to another popular type of publication of the era, pocket atlases. In America, these included Rand McNally and Co.’s atlases, while in Europe they included the “Taschen” atlases by the Justus Perthes publisher in Germany, Johann Georg Rothaug’s atlases in Austria and, above all, the atlases of the Austrian Anton Leo Hickmann published by Freytag & Berndt. Professor Hickmann’s graphic work would deserve a monograph in its own right, the pan-European influence of his atlases is evidenced by dozens of Russian, Hungarian, Romanian, and other versions of his various diagrams, pictorial statistics, and illustrations.

It is difficult to judge which type of publication influenced the other. Pictorial statistics also became widespread during this period. The first edition of the reference collection of pictorial statistics, the Dictionary of Statistics by George Mulhall was published in 1884, one year after the first edition of Peale’s Compendium came out. But these type of pictorial statistics were already in use before Dictionary of Statistics. The bulk of Hickmann’s graphic work dates from the 1890s. What I know from Rand McNally and Co. also dates back to the 1890s at the earliest. Below Peale’s charts we can read, that they were designed “expressively” for him.

Peale’s Compendium is not interesting to us because of its pictorial statistics. What makes your jaw drop is the dazzling and often almost incomprehensible profusion of various geometric shapes like circles, triangles, squares, rectangles, trapezoids, rhombuses. One gets the feeling that we are looking not at statistical diagrams, but at ornaments or decorations.

i think I will devote the next Collection to completely strange data graphics, borrowing the title Xenographics from Belgian information designer Maarten Lambrechts, who created a website for contemporary “weird, but (sometimes) useful charts.”

Some news

The 32nd edition of On Data and Design about the history of information design is out! Here is the video with Paul Kahn, Michael Stoll, and me, hosted by Superdot Studio’s Darjan Hil and Nicole Lachenmeier.

Last week I launched Cabinet of Infographic Curiosities’ new section: Cabinet’s Collection. The section currently contains two selections of rarities and hidden gems, graphics about history and chronology, and visualizations about connections, relations, links and networks. Check them out!

By the way, have you seen RJ Andrews’ Isotype explorer? It’s fantastic.

Isotype Explorer

See you next week!

These selections contain works that deal with the same theme using different visual solutions. The selection criteria are that the works presented should be little known or completely hidden gems, and should not appear in large, popular collections such as the David Rumsey Map Collection or the Public Domain Review, or in seminal and amazing books with historical interest like Sandra Rendgen and Julius Wiedemann’s History of Information Graphics, Manuel Lima’s “Book of” series or Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton’s Cartographies of Time.

I am aware that the collections are currently in version 1.0. It would be great if these collections could be searched, filtered, and sorted. See for example, iRJ Andrews’ fantastic and fresh Isotype collection or Razvan Zamfira’s excellent Romanian data visualization collection. This is not possible on Substack, so I may move these collections to my own website in the future, where these interactive searching-browsing-filtering features can be implemented.

The History collection brings together graphics that tell the story of a particular topic using the visual elements and conventions of information design. These include various timelines, time streams, histomaps, chronological, synchronic and synoptic charts.

This collection currently includes 34 works from Mexico, Chile, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Spain, Italy, England, Portugal, Germany, Austria, the United States, Russia, and Israel. The graphics fall into three sub-themes: General history, countries and nations; Religions; Art, architecture, literature and music. The graphics are presented in a chronological order.

It is interesting to see how certain visual ideas become fashionable and widely copied. One example is the famous Strom der Zeiten (Stream of Time) by Austrian historian Friedrich Strass, originally published in 1804 and later reprinted several times, which has been adapted to various local national histories, including Polish, Russian, German, Spanish, and Hungarian. Others supplement these representational traditions with new ideas, but there are also those that completely break away from the visual conventions of chronological charts. Overall, however, they all illustrate that the narration and visual presentation of history inspires people to creativity in design, which varies greatly from period to period.

The Connections collection presents graphics that depict various types of relationships, systems, networks. These include genealogical charts, family trees, dendrograms, organizational charts, and network diagrams.

Genealogical charts and family trees are an interesting type, as they present relationships from a historical perspective. Thus, there are and will be genealogical charts that belong in the Connection collection, and there are and will be those that belong in the History collection. The question is whether their creators place the emphasis on the historical perspective or on connections, relations and links.

This selection currently includes 20 graphic works from Mexico, Spain, Austria, Hungary, Greece, Turkey, Russia, Poland, France, Germany, and England in chronological order.

Under each image, you will find descriptive information (author, title, year of publication, notes) and the source of the image (linked). Since Substack reduces the quality of images somewhat when uploading them, and I had to reduce the resolution and size of many images, it is worth clicking on the original source of the image so that you can enjoy the images in high resolution.

The collections are constantly expanding. When a new batch of graphics is ready to be presented, I will announce it, when a new special collection has been compiled.

The Collections section can be accessed via the Cabinet’s Collection button below the header.

If you have any ideas about what could be included in the collections, or if you have any comments, please write me!

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