![]() ![]() Moreover, the exhibit shows that science can be a visual pursuit. Kieniewicz hopes that visitors will be inspired to “see how interesting some of these stories actually are and be keen to learn more.” In some sense, the exhibit-like the data it shows-is itself a tool for discovery. The map became an iconic and invaluable tool for Snow to both prove his hypothesis and communicate science to those who doubted him. Snow thought that water contamination-not miasma or “bad air,” prevailing ideas at the time-lay at the root of sweeping cholera epidemics hitting the city. She points to an 1855 map of London’s SoHo district by another English physician, John Snow, which shows cholera deaths clustered around a local well. “These diagrams are both tools of discovery as well as scientific communication, so in a sense highlighting the importance of data visualization to the overall scientific process,” says Kieniewicz. Infographics have long played a role in scientific endeavors. Sure, we have better tools for crunching the numbers today, but datamongers of the Victorian era were equally dedicated to recording all that they could observe. Like Nightingale’s diagram, Howard’s work also questions the idea that “ big data”-the exponential and unstructured growth of observations-is a modern phenomenon. ![]() In the weather and climate section, the work of amateur 19th-century meteorologist Luke Howard, who obsessively measured barometric pressure outside of his London home every day, doesn’t seem that far off from today’s citizen scientist movement. The visuals might at first seem totally unrelated, but subtle parallels-between the Great Chain of Being, Darwinian evolution, and modern taxonomic trees based on genetic data-show humanity’s continual efforts to classify and understand life and its ties to nature.Ĭircos diagrams showing the similarities between human genes and those of an opossum, as part of "Circles of Life." Another visual called “Circles of Life” by Canadian artist Martin Krzywinski depicts the genetic similarities between humans and other animals, including chimps and chickens, through colorful circle graphics generated by a computer program called Circos. The newest items in the exhibit are works such as One Zoom Tree, an interactive program developed by scientists at the Imperial College London that allows users to zoom in and explore different branches of the evolutionary tree. The tree of life section includes the oldest document in the collection: an image of the ancient Greek concept of the Great Chain of Being, depicted in 1617 by English physician Robert Fludd. And in fact, data is no longer static, but it’s actually something through which we can explore our world and interact,” says Johanna Kieniewicz, who curates the exhibit for the British Library.įor example, in the public health section an interactive program called Epidemic Planet (developed by researchers at Northeastern University and the ISI Foundation in Italy) allows visitors to tinker with parameters and see how an epidemic would spread across the globe under different settings. “The really interesting and exciting difference between then and now is the degree to which we can actually use the data. Though perhaps beautiful individually, maps of ocean currents from the 1700s look a little underwhelming compared to the technological wizardry of computer simulations in NASA’s “ Perpetual Ocean,” a swirling depiction of the world’s ocean currents that the library has projected onto a large screen in the exhibit. For one thing, technology has made modern visualizations much more dynamic. Obviously, a lot has changed over 400 years. Each section features infographics and data visualizations from past and present-allowing visitors to draw conclusions about how scientific visuals have changed, or stayed the same, over the centuries. The exhibit contains three sections: public health, weather and climate, and the tree of life. An exhibit at the British Library entitled “ Beautiful Science” displays 400 years worth of infographics, each with its own fascinating backstory. Today, her rose diagram remains iconic, but Nightingale certainly wasn’t the first to visualize her data, nor would she be the last. The diagram’s author, famed mother of nursing Florence Nightingale, had a talent for statistics. Tacked on to the appendix of a British government health report in 1858, a rose-shaped diagram presented a striking finding: during the Crimean War, far more soldiers died of disease in hospitals than of wounds on the battlefield. ![]()
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