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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.

In Metrography [looksgood.de], interaction design student Benedikt Groß presents us with an alternative view on London. What if the street map was reshaped according to the positions of the tube stations as placed on the Tube map?
The result is a 'warped' or 'morphed' map of London, that highlights the discrepancy between the stylized metro map and the geographically correct depiction. The resulting high-resolution prints can be viewed online in all detail.

The images below come from a Harvard Library exhibition from last year called: 'Going for Baroque - The Iconography of the Ornamental Map:

The ornamental features that may now seem little more than decorative embellishments once acted as richly nuanced symbols, analogies, and coded commentaries. This exhibit explores how decorative cartographic devices - cartouches, vignettes, figural borders, title pages, and frontispieces—could provide narrative underpinnings for the geospatial content of maps."

Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, 1973, through iPhone 4S

"The exhibit is a 10-year effort. Each year, 10 new maps are added resulting in 100 maps total in 2014. 1st Iteration (2005): The Power of Maps; 2nd Iteration (2006): The Power of Reference Systems; 3rd Iteration (2007): The Power of Forecasts; 4th Iteration (2008): Science Maps for Economic Decision Makers; 5th Iteration (2009): Science Maps for Science Policy Makers; 6th Iteration (2010): Science Maps for Scholars; 7th Iteration (2011): Science Maps as Visual Interfaces to Digital Libraries; 8th Iteration (2012): Science Maps for Kids; 9th Iteration (2013): Science Maps for Daily Science Forecasts; 10th Iteration (2014): Science Mapping Standards"

"There seems to be a commercial market emerging around the idea of automizing the creation of infographics. Toronto based start-up vizualize.me [vizualize.me] is currently developing an online application that can automatically translate any online LinkedIn profile into an online infographic. In particular, the new service aims to overcome the issue of reading overly long or highly complex resumes by showing the same information in a more readable and attractive way....Notably, Visual.ly is also betting on the future of semi-automized online infographics, as it is currently in the process of launching an online infographics authoring tool."

"Katie Lewis collects data through daily documentation processes, and then generates numerous systems to allow the information to exist in a material form. She abstracts and quantifies the data and creates mesmerizing pieces of art."

""The world we live in is awash with data, that comes pooring in from everywhere around us. On its own, this data is just noise and confusion. To make sense of data, to find the meaning in it, we need a powerful branch of science: statistics!" The promising ideas behind the BBC television series "The Joy of Stats" have been posted a few weeks ago. "

"By some estimates, we now create more data each year than in the entirety of prior human history. Data visualization helps us approach, interpret, and extract knowledge from this information. Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen government agencies, NGOs, and companies open up their data for the public to see and use. And we’ve seen data visualization figure more prominently in design curricula, conference programs, and the media. We created Visualizing.org because we want to help connect the proliferation of public data… with a community that can help us understand this data… with the general public.... For teachers and schools: Visualizing is a place to exhibit the collective work of your students, organize assignments and class projects, and help your students find data for their own visualizations; We’re working on new tools to help you share teaching material with other teachers

"Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, two of the most talented data visualization practitioners and researchers, were leaving IBM Visual Communication Lab to found a new data visualization venture, Flowing Media. "

Info graphic showing the making of a book

Infographics from the 19th century

"@rno klein is building this searchable database of information graphics from visitor submissions and numerous repositories on the internet. It was begun as an internal resource for PIIM employees, as a purely academic endeavor (all sources are cited). Part of our research program is to classify these and other information graphics according to a taxonomy under development.

As the database has grown, we felt that it could serve as a generally useful resource. We are accepting submissions with the goal of establishing the most comprehensive, manually annotated (and taxonomically classified) information graphics database in the world."

"I'm interested in examining how the spatial organization, labour and aesthetics of office culture are dealt with in film, gaming and digital art. Some of the topics that I'll be examining: The evolution of various document producing, processing and archival technologies (the vertical filing cabinet, the typewriter, the index card, the spreadsheet, etc.) and their progression from revolutionary into obsolescence and subsequent rediscovery through art."

Solar System Music Box

"24_7 explores the things that make up our daily routines and inverts them. Objects of everyday day life are taken and turned into exhibits that are capable of informing about themselves. Procedures and functionalities are being analysed, statistical and average values devalue the subjective view. Things are being dismantled and taken into their pieces"

"Stefanie’s maps capture something above and beyond that of the others. Rather than mapping physical geography, her maps capture regularities and patterns within a literary space. The pieces featured in On the Map focused on Kerouac’s On the Road. The maps visually represent the rhythm and structure of Kerouac’s literary space, creating works that are not only gorgeous from the point of view of graphic design, but also exhibit scientific rigor and precision in their formulation: meticulous scouring the surface of the text, highlighting and noting sentence length, prosody and themes, Posavec’s approach to the text is not unlike that of a surveyor. And similarly, the act is near reverential in its approach and the results are stunning graphical displays of the nature of the subject."

The Beast: Google: "The new movie, which itself seems to be inspired by the visual zooming effects from the presentation software Prezi, defines Google as an advertising giant whose main goal is to track users and deliver targeted ads."

Data Flow 2 "is jam-packed with innovative, smart and gripping examples of the way designers, programmers and artist are giving sense and beauty to the humongous mass of data that is overflowing our 'digital age'.... Infosthetics's Andrew Vande Moere and Visualcomplexity's Manuel Lima aptly open the round of interviews. Bloggers are the ones who made the broad audience aware of the existence and wonders of data aesthetics after all. Steve Duenes, graphics director for The New York Times, talks about how the work at his department relies on a mix of journalistic research and pure design. Cartographer Menno-Jan Kraak explains why map matter so much that they can inform and influence important decisions. ART+COM's Joachim Sauter gives his view on the difference between operating information in a design context and using information for for art's sake."

Clavilux 2000 [jonasheuer.de] is a subtle music visualization installation that represents the playing of sounds by way of a simultaneous animation that can be interpreted. For every note played on the keyboard, a stripe appears of which the dimensions, position and color correspond to the way the particular key was stroke. The length and vertical position of stripe is mapped unto the velocity, while the stripe's width reflects the length of each note.

We often think of scientific ideas, such as Darwin's theory of evolution, as fixed notions that are accepted as finished. In fact, Darwin's On the Origin of Species evolved over the course of several editions he wrote, edited, and updated during his lifetime....Using the six editions as a guide, we can see the unfolding and clarification of Darwin's ideas as he sought to further develop his theory during his lifetime....The text for each edition was sourced from their careful transcription of Darwin's books, and Dr. van Wyhe generously granted permission to use the text. This piece is a simpler version of a larger effort that looks at the changes between editions, and is intended as the first in a series looking at how the book evolved over time.