#SWDchallenge: remake a famous graph
”Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” —George Santayana
Believe it or not, the common formats we use today to visualize our data haven’t always existed. Someone invented the bar chart, the line graph, the pie chart, and so on. Individual people, in their own quests to communicate more effectively with data, have constantly been developing, refining, and in many cases discarding different techniques and visual methods for getting key messages across.
In corporate communications, straightforward, simple, versatile and—let's be frank—easy-to-produce graphs have proven to be the most enduring. But some of the most renowned individual graphs in history had custom designs that, although hard to understand for us today, were memorable and groundbreaking in their own time.
Nearly 200 years ago, the world first saw the "traveling wave" visualization of population growth by William Playfair, a statistician and a pioneer of statistical graphics. In the first half of the 19th century, the pioneering geographer John Snow used an early typeset to show the geographic distribution of a cholera outbreak in London. French engineer Charles Joseph Minard made a number of graphical presentations of data, including a map depicting the disastrous 1812 French invasion of Russia (popularized in no small part by its prominent mentions in the more recent works of Edward Tufte).
Florence Nightingale’s rose graphs conveyed the story of mortality versus causes for different hospitals. W.E.B. Du Bois created a series of visualizations bringing attention to many aspects of the life and history of the African-American population, from the beginning of the first census in 1790 through 1910. In more recent history, the works of Nigel Holmes, characterized as amusing by some and tacky by others, display unexpected, playful imagery with straightforward chart forms. Hans Rosling provided us with a famous animated bubble graph of life expectancy and wealth over the course of centuries.
Furthermore, if we broaden our definition of “famous graphics'' to include common infographic forms, we can consider examples such as a subway map (like those from the cities of New York, London, or Tokyo), the periodic table of elements (used for various purposes), or singular drawings like the "jittery needle" from The New York Times to show election return uncertanties, and the "flatten the curve" graph that Rosamund Pearce first created for The Economist, and became renowned to inform people about COVID-19's spread in early 2020.
The challenge
This month, we ask you to pick any famous historical infographic or visualization, and remake it in a form of your own choosing. You can simplify it, modernize it, limit its scope—whatever you feel is appropriate. (Try to find as close to the actual original data as you can, where possible; otherwise, take your best guess or make assumptions—noting in the footnote of your visual that you have done so—in the spirit of the challenge guidelines. Nobody is making business decisions based on the data you visualize here!)
You may feel that it's presumptuous to think that we could improve on these wildly famous and enduring visuals. To that, I counter that we have somewhere between 100 and 200 years more knowledge and technological advancements on our side...plus, we have immediate access to almost the entire breadth of the world's accumulated work. Those advantages alone should give you a fair chance at creating, at the minimum, an arguably comparable product as the original—and considering that the audience you'll be working for is also very different, you can tailor your submission to appeal specifically to them.
Submit your challenge entry—as well as a screenshot of your chosen historical visualization as a comparative—no later than March 31, 2023 at 5pm ET. In your commentary, describe why you chose your source visual to makeover and what you tried to improve. Take some time also to browse others’ submissions, and share your input via comments and datapoints over the course of the month. We’ll be discussing and highlighting some of your submissions for the broader storytelling with data audience in the future, so share as much insight into your makeover as you are comfortable doing.
Related resources
The history of data communication is surprisingly rich and interesting to investigate; Allen Hillery, RJ Andrews, and Jason Forrest are just some of the authors who have written excellent books and articles on the topic.
Data for at least some of the above mentioned graphs are available online, including:
