Title: In the Beginning (A Brief History of Visualisation)
Course: UGQuants (SSPS) > Section: Data Visualisation

In the Beginning (A Brief History of Visualisation)

Although it has exploded in recent decades, the birth of visualisation in statistics can be traced back to the early to mid 17^th century, and the work of René Descartes (in contrast, tabular statistics can be traced back to the 2^nd century).  Descartes developed the Cartesian coordinate system which allowed for mathematical equations to be expressed on a two-dimensional grid.   Descartes saw this, not as a means of data presentation, but as a means of visualising mathematical problems.  Only in the late 18^th century was the graphical presentation of numbers widely used for the identification of patterns within a dataset.

An early proponent of the graphical representation of data was the Scottish engineer and social scientist William Playfair. Playfair’s use of graphics was typically concerned with expressing distributions and the relative prevalence of different events.  For instance, he developed bar charts to show Scotland’s trade with different nations.  Subsequently, his 1801 Statistical Breviary is seen as one of the earliest attributable examples of a pie chart.

Figure 1: Line chart by Playfair showing the import and export rate of England with Denmark & Norway 1700-1780

Source: http://visibledata.wordpress.com/library/oldcharts/

Although primarily remembered for her nursing, Florence Nightingale was the first woman elected to the Royal Statistical Society in 1859. This was in recognition of her contribution to the graphical representation of data.  While caring for injured soldiers in the Crimean War, Nightingale expanded the logic of the pie chart to illustrate how the causes of death amongst soldiers varied depending on the time of year.  Nightingale’s diagrams, known as a “polar area diagram”, saw colours and the size of shaded areas used to represent the prevalence of different causes of death, where each slice of the diagram represented the deaths in a given month.

ScienceNews.org has created an animated version of her original graph.

Figure 2: Nightingale's Rose (Source: https://www.sciencenews.org/pictures/mathtrek/112608/nightingale.swf)

The widespread use of graphics to represent patterns in data within the media and general academia grew with the wider availability of computing power, and appropriate software, during the latter part of the 20^th century.  The ability to create graphs now exists not only in statistical software, but also in graphic design and desktop publishing software.  This shift is reflected in the rise of “info graphics”. More recently, the ability to animate graphs, and interact with them in videos has seen the growth of the use of graphical statistics as a key part of media reporting and television programmes. A major advocate of the power of such presentations is the Swedish statistician Hans Rosling.

Source: http://www.gapminder.org/videos/200-years-that-changed-the-world-bbc/