Where would you place the historical beginnings of information graphics?
I would start with early cave paintings. Seen from today's perspective, they unify visual storytelling and artistic beauty. In other words, art and science originally belonged together, and their division is a relatively recent phenomenon. Although there aren't many examples of infographics remaining from the following centuries, I'd stop talking about the beginnings by the year 1350, when the French bishop Nicole Oresme (1323-1382) "invented" the bar chart. Then, in 1493, Hartmann Schedel printed his famous book Schedel'sche Weltchronik, which explained how God spent the first seven days creating the world. Leonardo da Vinci's technical drawings were tools to clear up thoughts and convey knowledge in a visual manner. In 1786 William Playfair made extensive use of infographics, explaining economic matters in his Commercial and Political Atlas. Finally, in 1869 Charles Joseph Minard created an impressive diagram about Napoleon's march to Moscow and back... A taxonomy cannot relate to the aspect of visualisation—pie charts, bar charts, explosion drawings—which could disappear from time to time, but rather to the information behind the visualisation. All visual means that try to explain something to you can be placed into one of three groups. The first group is based on numbers, statistics and relations between sizes (data graphics); the second group is made up of objects (group system graphics); and the third one consists of spatial data like maps (spatial graphics). As these fields often overlap, it's also important to consider the borders between information design and, for example, illustration. I always say that information graphics has a strong appeal in the way it can clear up stuff and convey knowledge. Compared to examples such as illustration, information graphics always seeks to increase the knowledge of the reader, like every design process... The idea behind system graphics is not to make things more concrete but to make them more abstract. So by transforming photographs of surgery or forensic entomology into a graphic, you make them consumable. A translation into a vector graphic helps to look at things that would otherwise shock you. Only drawing gives you the ability to modulate details within one image. When you take a photograph you have the possibility to bring one object into the centre, but with an infographic you can show how it works internally... In perspectives the presence of the viewer is very strong, while an axonometric view has no centre point at all. We could say it's more democratic. In axonometric maps you're above the scene, not part of it, and when you don't have a vanishing point everything looks "over-parallel": everything is clear, clean and in the same light. Perhaps it's more of a communistic than democratic view of a scene. Often axonometric maps look more beautiful than reality itself... Are you familiar with Baidu? The Chinese can't show satellite images of their cities so they model these detailed axonometric cityscapes. Baidu shows very beautiful representations, similar to hand-drawn maps. They're like the depiction of a promise, telling you that it's a beautiful country to live in, whether it's true or not.

21 Feb 2012

22 Feb 2012

In order to screen unclassified material, all Australian film festivals must request an exemption from classification for the content they have programmed. The Classification Board have chosen to refuse this exemption for two of the titles selected for this festival. Community Action Centre and In Their Room: Berlin. ...

Wikipedia's category hierarchy forms a graph. It's definitely cyclic (Category:Ethology belongs to Category:Behavior, which in turn belongs to Category:Ethology).

At any rate, did you know that "Chicago Stags coaches" are a subcategory of "Natural sciences"?

Downloadable version of FAST now available

16 Feb 2012

... any idea of what an instance could be?

Looking closely at http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/iso639-1/fr for the first
time seriously (shame on me, can't even tell since when this URI has been
available) ...
I read that it is a *rdfs:subClassOf*
http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/iso639-1/iso639-1_Language

Well, why isn't it an *instance* of this class?
I can see the rationale : there is not "one" French language, one can
imagine further subclasses such as Canadian French, Middle-Age French etc.
so French is a class of languages OK.
But are there any subclasses of French defined at id.loc.gov ?

And if it were the case, where do one stop the subclasses recursion and
introduce instances, if any? Is it turtles all the way down?

The Australian
November 21, 2011 12:00AM

A GRAPHICAL analysis of more than 1000 submissions to the ALRC's National Classification Scheme Review issues paper suggests the most effective means of controlling access to content was parental supervision and filtering, and not overarching regulation.

The textual analysis of submissions by ALRC Commissioner, Professor Terry Flew produced an analytical "concept tree" that found the term "adults" related to concepts such as "freedom", "government" and "censorship" while the term "children" related to "protect", "violence", "offensive" and "illegal".