Milestones and highlights in visualization
Rob Cogan
Friday, 28 March 2008 08:05 UTC
Many people feel that visualization began with Charles Minard’s 1861 map/graph of Napoleon’s march to Moscow and back (at, e.g., http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Minard.png).
It was startling in its time. Do you have any favorites (or favourites, if you will) that were conceptually advanced for their times?
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Replies
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I’m not sure I know enough about this topic to have any favourites, although I read a good review in this week’s Sunday Times of the book Cosmic Imagery: Key Images in the History of Science by John Barrow.
Nevertheless, I have to say I’ve always like the Schrödinger’s cat example he references, and Watson and Crick’s DNA model is a famous but pertinent example.
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Some years ago (maybe 5?) I read a review of a book that apparently did an excellent job of explaining the principles and applications of visualization tricks. I remember the reviewer thought the book did a particularly good job on covering false 3D representations for 2D printing. I made the mistake of not ordering the book there and then, so of course I remember nothing that would let me track it down now. If by some miracle anybody can deduce what the book was, I’d like to know.
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Helen—is this the image you had in mind??:
Rob—great question! In some way, tons of examples pop to mind, but the question is which are truly outstanding. I think Michelangelo’s diagram of anatomical proportions has stood the test of time:
And there are some great examples from early astronomy books, such as Kepler’s Mysterium Cosmographicum:
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I guess Schrödinger’s cat is an analogy rather than an actual way to visualize a concept. Whoops.
Gray’s Anatomy, initially published in 1858, was one of the first affordable books to present the human body in clear and well orgnized way. Can I give this book my vote instead?!
BTW, I didn’t mean my last post to sound like some kind of marketing blurb! I’d just recently read the book review and thought you guys might be interested.
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Many of my scientist friends are biophysicists, and the received text is “Visual Display of Quantitative Information” by E. Tufte. I believe he has written various reworkings over the years.
Felice Frankel of MIT has written many articles on this topic too, and at least one book, Envisioning Science: The Design and Craft of the Science Image (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002), but maybe another since then.
Some years ago, when I was Commentary editor of Nature, I handled a rather good article by J. Ottino, Is a picture worth 1000 words?.
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