From the Battlefield to Basketball: A Data Visualization Journey with Florence Nightingale
In 1858, Florence Nightingale published a study on the conditions of army hospitals, her seminal Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army. Her Diagram of the Causes of Mortality had a singular goal: to vividly demonstrate that the lack of proper sanitary caretaking facilities was a far more severe, but also far more avoidable, cause of death for soldiers than injuries suffered in battle. It’s one thing to simply state that the disease killed a lot of soldiers. It’s another thing entirely to effectively and actionably juxtapose it against the casualties encountered at the hands of the opposing army.
Nightingale could have just taken a cue from her predecessors in the data visualization realm and drawn a bunch of bar charts (maybe throw in a line graph if she wanted to get edgy). It would have been the most precise way of capturing the data she spent so much time recording. But, my goodness, what a boring world we’d live in today if she had. And also, probably more soldiers would have continued to die for a bit longer from preventable causes. But mainly, data viz would be more boring; that’s what’s important here, for this article at least.
