From the New Yorker, Dec. 2013:
Near
the end of 1861, with the American Union crumbling, President Abraham
Lincoln became obsessed with an unusual document. Nearly three feet in
length, it appeared at first to be a map of the southern states. But it
was covered with finely rendered shading, with the darkness of each
county reflecting the number of slaves who lived there. South Carolina,
the first to secede from the Union, featured a particularly dark
coastline. Yet other parts of the South (like western Virginia) appeared
as islands of lightness.
Lincoln often studied the map, and it “bore the marks of much
service,” according to a memoir by Francis Bicknell Carpenter, an
eminent painter who was at the White House conducting research for a
portrait of the President. At one point, Carpenter borrowed Lincoln’s
map so that he could include it in the painting. Some time later, the President visited him in his studio and, spotting his precious map, declared, “Ah! … you
have appropriated my map, have you? I have been looking all around for
it.” Then Lincoln slipped on his glasses, sat on a trunk by a window,
and “began to pore over it very earnestly.”
In the map,
Lincoln saw testimony that the American south was not a uniform bloc.
Areas of heavy slavery—the darkened banks along the Mississippi River,
for example—tended to be secessionist, but the areas in between held the
hope of pro-Union sympathy. Unlike traditional cartography, the map was
designed to portray political terrain and, in Lincoln’s mind, moral
terrain. The President called it his “slave map.” Today we would call it
an infographic.
Infographics are clearly having a cultural moment. They have become pervasive in newspapers, magazines, blog posts, and viral tweets; they appear on television and in advertising, in political campaigns and at art openings. As a Google search term, “infographic”
has increased nearly twenty-fold in the last five years. Yet
infographics have been popular, in one form or another, for centuries.
The source of their power isn’t computers or the Internet, but the
brain’s natural visual intelligence.
Credit for the world’s first infographics should probably go to
William Playfair, a Scottish engineer, economist, and failed
silversmith. In 1786, Playfair published the “Commercial and Political
Atlas,” which included the first known line graphs. In one graph, for
example, Playfair showed England’s exports and imports in a single chart:
in the seventeen-fifties, the export line shoots up, and around the
middle of the decade it crosses the import line, showing a trade
surplus. Until that time, economists worked with expanses of figures
arranged in rows and columns. With Playfair’s innovation, the numbers
became dots connected in space and their broader meaning became
immediately apparent.
The importance of what he had done was not recognized at the time,
but Playfair, who also invented pie charts and bar graphs, had found a
way to take advantage of a potent pattern-recognition machine: the human
brain. From the first moment that animals on earth developed sight, the
advantage went to those who were fastest to discern the patterns, or
unusual details, that signalled potential threats—or potential
opportunities. The human brain has been shaped by eons of evolution to
make immediate sense of its surroundings. Roughly half of the human
brain is involved in processing images. Playfair took information that
is not easy for us to absorb (columns of British import-export figures)
and put it into a form (a landscape of peaks and valleys) that the brain
can interpret with speed. This is the idea behind all infographics....MORE
HT to ValueWalk for reminding me we had Playfair in the link-vault.
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