"(Originally presented at the Emerging Media session on Wednesday 30 July 2008 by Corin Edwards & Michael Cheng, Web Services, Resource Discovery.)

History

Joseph Minard
Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l'Armée Française dans la campagne de Russie 1812-1813
(Figurative chart of the successive losses of men of the French Army in the countryside of Russia 1812-1813)
1869

• the army's location and direction, showing where units split off and rejoined
• the declining size of the army (note e.g. the crossing of the Berezina river on the retreat)
• the low temperatures during the retreat.

"defies the pen of the historian in its brutal eloquence" - Étienne-Jules Marey
"It may well be the best statistical graph ever drawn." - Edward R. Tufte

• http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/posters
• http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery/minbib.html

John Snow
Original map by Dr. John Snow showing the clusters of cholera cases in the London epidemic of 1854
1854
Snow later used a spot map to illustrate how cases of cholera were centred around the pump. He also made a solid use of statistics to illustrate the connection between the quality of the source of water and cholera cases. He showed that companies taking water from sewage-polluted sections of the Thames delivered water to homes with an increased incidence of cholera. Snow's study was a major event in the history of public health, and can be regarded as the founding event of the science of epidemiology.

• http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow/mapmyth/mapmyth.html
• http://www.johnsnowsociety.org/
• http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow/choleragoldensquare.html

Harry Beck
London Underground Tube map
1933
Prior Maps
Harry Beck's Redesign

• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/London_Underground_geographic_maps

• http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/projectsandschemes/communityandeducation/2443.aspx
• http://homepage.ntlworld.com/clivebillson/tube/tube.html

Some examples of current visualisation trends

WE FEEL FINE
http://www.wefeelfine.org/api.html
We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. The system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling".

NEWSMAP
http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap
Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator.

RSS VOYAGE
http://rssvoyage.com/#RSS=loaded
Displays news feeds chronologically with current messages in the foreground and older messages in the background

AMAZTYPE
http://amaztype.tha.jp
Typographic book search, through Amazon catalog

OLYMPIC MEDAL COUNT MAP
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/08/04/sports/olympics/20080804_MEDALCOUNT_MAP.html
Use the slider to select a particular Olympic Games and see which countries won medals, and how many of each. (1976 - the only Olympics where Australia has won no gold medals.)

WATCHING THE GROWTH OF WALMART ACROSS AMERICA
http://projects.flowingdata.com/walmart/
A map of the United States showing the addition of new Walmarts across the county between 1964 and 2007.

More Current Approaches

Stamen Design
cabspotting.org
2005
Cabspotting is designed as a living framework to use the activity of commercial cabs as a starting point to explore the economic, social, political and cultural issues that are revealed by the cab traces.
• Where do cabs go the most?
• Where do they never turn up?
Cab Projects are vehicles for artists, writers, or researchers to explore these issues in the form of a small experiment, investigation or observation. These projects will be included on an ever-growing Cabspotting site to form a continually expanding view of the anthropological record created by this system.

Magnetic Movie
www.semiconductorfilms.com/root/Magnetic_Movie/Magnetic.htm
2007
The secret lives of invisible magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic ever-changing geometries . All action takes place around NASA's Space Sciences Laboratories, UC Berkeley, to recordings of space scientists describing their discoveries . Actual VLF audio recordings control the evolution of the fields as they delve into our inaudible surroundings, revealing recurrent ‘whistlers' produced by fleeting electrons . Are we observing a series of scientific experiments, the universe in flux, or a documentary of a fictional world?.

Microsoft
http://labs.live.com/photosynth/
2008
The Photosynth Technology Preview is a taste of the newest - and, we hope, most exciting - way to view photos on a computer. Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next.

Flowing Data
http://flowingdata.com/about/
"FlowingData explores how designers, statisticians, and computer scientists are using data to understand ourselves better - mainly through data visualization. Money spent, reps at the gym, time you waste, and personal information you enter online are all forms of data. How can we understand these data flows? Data visualization lets non-experts make sense of it all."