Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
published as large-format topics (about
in.), and many of the plates folded out
to four or six times that size, all printed in colour and with great attention to layout
andcomposition.WeconcurwithFunkhouser( ,p. )that“the Albums present
the finest specimens of French graphic work in the century and considerable pride
was taken in them by the French people, statisticians and laymen alike.”
he subject matter of the albums largely concerned economic and financial data
related tothe planning, development andadministration of publicworks -transport
of passengers and freight, by rail, on inland waterways and through seaports, but
also included such topics as revenues in the major theaters of Paris, attendance at
the universal expositions of , and , changes in populations of French
departments over time and so forth.
More significantly for this account the Albums canalsobeviewedasanexquisite
sampler of all the graphical methods known at the time, with significant adaptations
to the problem at hand. he majority of these graphs used and extended the flow
map pioneered by Minard. Others used polar forms - variants of pie and circle dia-
grams, star plots and rose diagrams, oten overlaid on a map and extended to show
additional variables of interest. Still others used subdivided squares in the manner
of modern mosaic displays (Friendly, ) to show the breakdown of a total (pas-
sengers, freight) by several variables. It should be noted that in almost all cases the
graphical representation of the data was accompanied by numerical annotations or
tables, providing precise numerical values.
he Albums are discussed extensively by Palsky ( ),who includes seven repre-
sentative illustrations. It is hard to choose a single image here, but my favourites are
surely the recursive, multimosaic of rail transportation for the - volumes,
the first of which is shown in Fig. . . his cartogram uses one large mosaic (in the
lower let) to show the numbers of passengers and tons of freight shipped from Paris
from the four principal train stations. Of the total leaving Paris, the amounts going
to each main city are shown by smaller mosaics, coloured according to railway lines;
of those amounts, the distribution to smaller cities is similarly shown, connected by
lines along the rail routes.
Among the many other national statistical albums and atlases, those from the US
Censusbureaualsodeservespecialmention. he Statistical Atlas of the Ninth Census,
produced in - under the direction of Francis A. Walker [ - ], con-
tained plates, including several novel graphic forms. he ambitious goal was to
present a graphic portrait of the nation, and it covered a wide range of physical and
human topics: geology, minerals and weather; population by ethnic origin, wealth,
illiteracy, school attendance and religious a liation; death rates by age, sex, race and
cause;prevalenceofblindness,deafmutismandinsanity;andsoforth.'Agepyramids'
(back-to-back, bilateral frequency histograms and polygons) were used effectively to
compare age distributions of the population for two classes (gender, married/single,
etc.). Subdivided squares and area-proportional pies of various forms were also used
to provide comparisons among the states on multiple dimensions simultaneously
as an engineer at the ENPC and later became a professor of political economy at the École
des Mines.
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