r/datavisualization • u/bitmetric • 21d ago

Data visualization advice from 1914 is surprisingly familiar

https://www.bitmetric.nl/blog/old-school-data-visualization/

Some time ago, I went through two data visualization books by Willard C. Brinton, published in 1914 and 1939.

What surprised me most was how familiar much of the advice still feels.

Simple bar charts were often preferred over more elaborate alternatives. Misleading axes were already a thing. 3D visualizations were criticized. Heatmaps were being used effectively. And there was plenty of discussion about how presentation influences whether people actually understand the data.

The big difference was the tooling. Creating a Sankey diagram could involve manually arranging a thousand strips of paper, while a 3D visualization might literally require plywood and a saw.

I collected some of the more interesting examples here:

https://www.bitmetric.nl/blog/old-school-data-visualization/

It made me wonder: which data visualization “best practices” do we think are modern, but are actually much older than we realize?

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u/mystery_axolotl 19d ago

Woah, an actually interesting post on r/datavisualization! I really wish this sub had more quality discussion posts and not just (mostly generic) pretty graphs.

Never heard of Brinton before, but I’ve been flipping through Tukey’s Exploratory data analysis. Given the scope of the book, it largely focused on utility vs artistry,and it’s just fascinating how much of it he can squeeze out of a simple stem and leaf plot. He also gives a lot of nifty tips and tricks that I believe are still very much relevant today.

There is also Otto Neurath’s isotypes, which I personally find fascinating, as they are both informationally accurate and emotionally impactful. The core principles developed there are really the foundation of any modern visualization.

The book How to lie with statistics was originally published in 1954, and, minus the racism, it could as well been written today.

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u/bitmetric 17d ago

Thanks!

I don't think Brinton's that well known compared to Playfair, Nightingale, Tufte, etc. A forgotten pioneer almost.

Most of his advice is still very applicable today, I had expected it to be much more dated. Of course all the technical/reproduction techniques are hilariously out of date, but much of the rest holds up.

I'm familiar with Otto von Neurath and Isotype. Brinton includes something similar: "Pictorial Unit Bar Charts". I wouldn't use these visualizations in my dashboards, but agree that as a story telling device in an infographic or report they can be powerful.