Visualization in 1939

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Willard Cope Brinton's second book Graphic Presentation (1939) surprised me with the quality of its graphics. Prof. Michael Stoll has some scans at Flickr. For example:


1939-g.jpg

The whole book can be downloaded (in a worse resolution) from Archive.Org.

5 Comments

Those do look very nice. I guess when you have to spend 10+ hours creating a single figure by hand, you may tend to put a bit more thought into what it should look like.

Beautiful. I was surprised not to see any scatterplots. Perhaps scatterplots had not yet been invented?

Scatterplots go back to at least John Herschel in the 19th century.

Friendly, M., and D. Denis. 2005. The early origins and development of the scatterplot. Journal of the History of the
Behavioral Sciences 41: 103–130.

The chart at the top of page 259 shows early Harvey Balls, years before Harvey Poppel.

As Alex notes, this was Brinton's second book. His earlier "Graphic methods for presenting facts" New York: Engineering Magazine Company, 1914 is also worth a look for e.g.

emphasis on difficulties of using two-dimensional and three-dimensional graphics

a critique of pie charts [not yet so named] and other circular representations

stress on merits of horizontal and left-to-right alignment

examples of spineplots and parallel coordinate plots

scatter plots with "smooth" curves superimposed


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Recent Comments

  • Nick Cox: As Alex notes, this was Brinton's second book. His earlier read more
  • derek: The chart at the top of page 259 shows early read more
  • Nick Cox: Scatterplots go back to at least John Herschel in the read more
  • Andrew Gelman: Beautiful. I was surprised not to see any scatterplots. Perhaps read more
  • Ian Fellows: Those do look very nice. I guess when you have read more

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This page contains a single entry by Aleks Jakulin published on May 13, 2010 8:33 PM.

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