THE BEGINNINGS OF MEDIEVAL INFORMATION VISUALIZATION - Information Visualisation: Techniques, Usability and Evaluation - page 8

were believed to be inhabitable, with the known world populating the
northern temperate zone's Eastern Hemisphere. Because most surviving
zonal maps are traceable to illustrations in Macrobius's Commentary , this
map is also known as a “Macrobian” map.
The significance of the visualizations in Macrobius's Commentary is
not that they are early visual representations of information, which they
are, but rather that they represent the results of a formalized process for
visualizing information which Macrobius explicitly states as part of his
narrative. Here is part of his procedure for generating Fig. 1.1 taken from
Hiatt's translation from the Latin [15]:
…let there be [drawn] a circle of earth on which the letters ABCD are
inscribed; and around A, let N and L be written; around B, the letters M
and K; and around C, G and I; and around D, E and F…
Macrobius goes further to clarify the meaning of the relationships among
the parallel lines:
…the two spaces thus opposite each other, that is the one from C up to the
line which is drawn from I, the other from D up to the line which is drawn
from F, should be understood to be 'frozen with perpetual winter', for the
upper one is the furthest northern zone, the lower the furthest southern.
The difference between “learning something” and “learning to do
something” clearly was important to Macrobius, otherwise he could have
easily omitted the procedural details for diagram creation. The ultimate
result is that his Commentary is transformed, at least in part, from an
informational treatise to a handbook along the lines of Vitruvius's De
Architectura , in which information sets the context for a formal discussion
of architectural and engineering practice.
Boëthius
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius (c. 475-7 CE-c. 524? CE) was born
into an elite Roman family, lost his father at an early age, and was
subsequently adopted by Quintus Aurelius Memmius Symmachus (d.
526), a Roman aristocrat and historian of the sixth century, who belonged
to the Symmachi, one of the richest and most influential senatorial families
in Rome. Under the tutelage of his adopted father, Boëthius rapidly grew
intellectually - learning Greek, studying ancient Greek scholars, and
developing an ambitious agenda of translating all the works of Aristotle
and Plato into Latin, in order to make them available as part of the