A comprehensive history of data visualization—its origins, rise, and effects on the ways we think about and solve problems. With complex information everywhere, graphics have become indispensable to our daily lives. Navigation apps show real-time, interactive traffic data. A color-coded map of exit polls details election balloting down to the county level. Charts communicate stock market trends, government spending, and the dangers of epidemics. A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication tells the story of how graphics left the exclusive confines of scientific research and became ubiquitous. As data visualization spread, it changed the way we think. Michael Friendly and Howard Wainer take us back to the beginnings of graphic communication in the mid-seventeenth century, when the Dutch cartographer Michael Florent van Langren created the first chart of statistical data, which showed estimates of the distance from Rome to Toledo. By 1786 William Playfair had invented the line graph and bar chart to explain trade imports and exports. In the nineteenth century, the “golden age” of data display, graphics found new uses in tracking disease outbreaks and understanding social issues. Friendly and Wainer make the case that the explosion in graphical communication both reinforced and was advanced by a cognitive revolution: visual thinking. Across disciplines, people realized that information could be conveyed more effectively by visual displays than by words or tables of numbers. Through stories and illustrations, A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication details the 400-year evolution of an intellectual framework that has become essential to both science and society at large.

Over the past 50 years, the influence of visuals has impacted society with greater frequency. No subject is immune from the power of visual culture, and this fact becomes especially pronounced with regards to history and historical discourse. Where once the study of the past was books and printed articles, the environment has changed and students now enter the lecture hall with a sense of history that has been gleaned from television, film, photography, and other new media. They come to understand history based on what they have seen and heard, not what they have read. What are the implications of this process, this visualization of history? Mark Moss discusses the impact of visuals on the study of history with an examination of visual culture and the future of print. Recognizing the visual bias of the younger generations and using this as a starting point for teaching history is a critical component for reaching students. By providing an analysis of photography, film, television, and computer culture, Moss uses the Holocaust as an historical case study to illustrate the ways in which visual culture can be used to bring about an awareness of history, as well as the potential for visual culture becoming a driving force for social and cultural change.

This visionary and thoroughly accessible book examines how digital environments and virtual reality have altered the ways historians think and communicate ideas and how the new language of visualization transforms our understanding of the past. Drawing on familiar graphic models--maps, flow charts, museum displays, films--the author shows how images can often convey ideas and information more efficiently and accurately than words.

This visionary and thoroughly accessible book examines how digital environments and virtual reality have altered the ways historians think and communicate ideas and how the new language of visualization transforms our understanding of the past. Drawing on familiar graphic models--maps, flow charts, museum displays, films--the author shows how images can often convey ideas and information more efficiently and accurately than words. With emerging digital technology, these images will become more sophisticated, manipulable, and multidimensional, and provide historians with new tools and environments to construct historical narratives. Moving beyond the traditional book based on linear narrative, digital scholarship based on visualization and hypertext will offer multiple perspectives, dimensions, and experiences that transform the ways historians work and people imagine and learn about history. This second edition of Computers, Visualization, and History features expanded coverage of such topics as sequential narratives, 3-D modeling, simulation, and video games, as well as our theoretical understanding of space and immersive experience. The author has also added "Guidelines for Visual Composition in History" for history and social studies teachers who wish to use technology for student assignments. Also new to the second edition is a web link feature that users of the digital edition can use to enhance visualization within the text.

Information may be beautiful, but our decisions about the data we choose to represent and how we represent it are never neutral. This insightful history traces how data visualization accompanied modern technologies of war, colonialism and the management of social issues of poverty, health and crime. Discussion is based around examples of visualization, from the ancient Andean information technology of the quipu to contemporary projects that show the fate of our rubbish and take a participatory approach to visualizing cities. This analysis places visualization in its theoretical and cultural contexts, and provides a critical framework for understanding the history of information design with new directions for contemporary practice.

The Routledge Companion to Cultural History in the Western World is a comprehensive examination of recent discussions and findings in the exciting field of cultural history. A synthesis of how the new cultural history has transformed the study of history, the volume is divided into three parts – medieval, early modern and modern – that emphasize the way people made sense of the world around them. Contributions cover such themes as material cultures of living, mobility and transport, cultural exchange and transfer, power and conflict, emotion and communication, and the history of the senses. The focus is on the Western world, but the notion of the West is a flexible one. In bringing together 36 authors from 15 countries, the book takes a wide geographical coverage, devoting continuous attention to global connections and the emerging trend of globalization. It builds a panorama of the transformation of Western identities, and the critical ramifications of that evolution from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, that offers the reader a wide-ranging illustration of the potentials of cultural history as a way of studying the past in a variety of times, spaces and aspects of human experience. Engaging with historiographical debate and covering a vast range of themes, periods and places, The Routledge Companion to Cultural History in the Western World is the ideal resource for cultural history students and scholars to understand and advance this dynamic field.

The Routledge Companion to Spatial History explores the full range of ways in which GIS can be used to study the past, considering key questions such as what types of new knowledge can be developed solely as a consequence of using GIS and how effective GIS can be for different types of research. Global in scope and covering a broad range of subjects, the chapters in this volume discuss ways of turning sources into a GIS database, methods of analysing these databases, methods of visualising the results of the analyses, and approaches to interpreting analyses and visualisations. Chapter authors draw from a diverse collection of case studies from around the world, covering topics from state power in imperial China to the urban property market in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, health and society in twentieth-century Britain and the demographic impact of the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915. Critically evaluating both the strengths and limitations of GIS and illustrated with over two hundred maps and figures, this volume is an essential resource for all students and scholars interested in the use of GIS and spatial analysis as a method of historical research.

The five-volume set LNCS 8004--8008 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2013, held in Las Vegas, NV, USA in July 2013. The total of 1666 papers and 303 posters presented at the HCII 2013 conferences was carefully reviewed and selected from 5210 submissions. These papers address the latest research and development efforts and highlight the human aspects of design and use of computing systems. The papers accepted for presentation thoroughly cover the entire field of human-computer interaction, addressing major advances in knowledge and effective use of computers in a variety of application areas. This volume contains papers in the thematic area of human-computer interaction, addressing the following major topics: speech, natural language and auditory interfaces; gesture and eye-gaze based Interaction; touch-based interaction; haptic interaction; graphical user interfaces and visualisation.

This is the first of a two-volume set that constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Symposium on Human Interface 2007, held in Beijing, China in July 2007. It covers design and evaluation methods and techniques, visualizing information, retrieval, searching, browsing and navigation, development methods and techniques, as well as advanced interaction technologies and techniques.