Designing a data visualization or map:
Finding sources means knowing the traditions you're working in:
Actual Appearance
Champlain's 1612 map of New France.
Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg carte chronologique. 1753
Joseph Priestly (1733-1804)
Priestley's historical chart (1769)
J.H. Colton's Stream of Time, 1842.
William Playfair?
Not William Playfair
This Chart is different from the others in principle, as it does
not comprehend any portion of time, and it is much inferior in utility to those that do; for though
it gives the extent of the different branches of trade, it does not compare the same branch of
commerce with itself at different periods. . .”
(Playfair, 1786, p. 101, from Tufte, 1983, p. 33).
Playfair tries to explain the bar chart:
Suppose the money received by a man in trade were all in guineas,and that every evening he made a single pile of all the guineas received during that day, each pile would represent a day, and its height would be proportional to the receipts of that day; so that by this plain operation,time, proportion, and amount, would all be physically combined. Lineal arithmetic, then, it may be averred,is nothing more than those piles of guineas represented on paper.
Caption: Playfair's Pie and Circle Charts, 1801
Galton's "scatterplot"
The actual picture of Galton's scatterplot.
Guerry's choropleths, 1820s
Snow's map of the 1854 cholera epidemic.
Florence Nightingale, 1857
Minard's chart of Napoleon's march on Russia.
A modern interpretation of Minard's map.
Mulhall's pictogram (1884)
The most Tuftean Boston charts you'll see
What methods from Tufte could you use to help these charts "escape flatland?" and depict the story of Boston's growth?