Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
Overview
Peter has commented that his intention is to communicate to a broad spectrum of
people engaged in political issues on a global scale. Everyone Ever in the World was
a self-generated project to visually represent the number of people to have ever lived
versus those killed in wars, massacres and genocides during the recorded history of
humankind. The format is a type-based poster that represents the concepts of life and
death. The poster is printed with semi-transparent ink with circles cut directly out of
the material.
Peter has a very logical rationale for the poster and represents factual evidence
through graphic representations. The user has
to decode the poster in order to understand the statistics portrayed. It is a complex
piece of data visualization that has been designed to be viewed in person, as a poster,
rather than online. This summary below helps to explain what the data represents:
• Total paper area = 650 x 920mm (represents the 77.6 billion people to have ever
lived).
• Die-cut circle (the centre white circle) represents the 969 million people who have
died in wars, massacres and genocides.
• Area of the die-cut circle = 969 million/77.6 billion = 1.25% of the paper area
(650mm x 920mm x 0.0125). All this information is shown on the poster.
• The text lists all recorded conflicts - it is a list, but grouped by millennia - allowing
for a visual representation of counts. Lines stop as the earlier millennia have fewer
recorded conflicts.
The text emanating from the centre lists wars from 3200 BCE to 2009 CE. The se-
quence of dots to the top left of the graph shows the dramatic increase in the number
of conflicts over the past five millennia (left to right: from 3200 BCE to 2009 CE),
one dot for each millennia, with the most recent 1,000 years being the most violent.
The large dot below the graph represents the 1,000 years to come: a predicted start-
ling increase in the frequency of human conflict.
