Information Graphic Visionaries
A look behind the scenes of RJ Andrews’ new book series
Historic data visualization creators — they were just like us, according to award-winning data storyteller RJ Andrews. They, like us, often found themselves working with too much data, struggling with difficult tools, and designing for data illiterate audiences, all while trying to improve the world by sharing information. Sure, their context and tools were different, but the fundamental problem solving challenges they faced were the same. We can all, therefore, take inspiration from the designers who came before.
This conviction was what compelled RJ to launch a new book series, Information Graphic Visionaries, which he announced on Kickstarter today. Ahead of the announcement, I had the chance to sit down and chat with him about his own inspiration for the books, the process of researching and designing them, and what readers can expect to find inside. I’ve summarized key points from our conversation below.
With these books, RJ aims to elevate the craft of data visualization to garner more respect for the practice.
Data visualization is a visual medium, and as such, RJ believes we should show more appreciation for its beauty and craft. (Data visualization designers are “more than just a graphics service desk,” as he put it, with no offense to graphics service desks everywhere.) This is what RJ hopes to do for the work of the three designers featured in the Visionaries series launch: Emma Willard, Florence Nightingale, and Étienne-Jules Marey.
As RJ describes it, his goal for the series is to “celebrate the tradition of our craft, celebrate the people who have gone before, who lit the way and gave us the torch to keep running forward.” He describes falling in love with not just Willard’s, Nightingale’s, and Marey’s iconic graphics, but with the ideas they were meant to convey and the approach each took to data communication. “Across all of these historic people, and also our work today, it’s not really about information as much as informing. It’s about the ideas. We [data visualization designers] just happen to have the most beautiful way of conveying ideas.”
The Visionaries books explore the ideas behind iconic graphics by pairing beautiful, indulgent images with scholarly research, drawing on essays, letters, drafts, and other original work by the historic creators themselves. Digging up these artifacts and documenting the context and stories behind the graphics was the work of an international editorial team, which includes Susan Schulten, Georges Hattab, Lynn McDonald, and Marta Braun. This deep dive into the archives is central to RJ’s mission: “Once you are able to look beyond just the single iconic image, you can actually appreciate what the creators were trying to do,” he explains.
Another important aspect of elevating the craft of data visualization is creating profoundly beautiful work that inspires. That starts with capturing the reader’s attention. For the Visionaries books, RJ worked with designer Lorenzo Fanton to create bold, modern dust jackets that are intentionally under-sized to reveal the historic visualizations peeking out underneath — a fitting metaphor for the modern books and their historical subjects, in a way.
Examining historical data visualization reveals how constrained our practice is today.
In addition to appreciating the beauty of historic visualizations, RJ believes that present-day data visualization practitioners can learn from the creative, freeform approaches taken by their historic counterparts. “From one perspective, I believe that they arrived at solutions that in many ways are more human because their tools were more human that what we use today,” RJ explains. Their tools, of course, were largely pen and paper, often wielded by professional drafts-people to make the polished products we’re familiar with today. “If you don’t understand how people solved [data visualization problems] in the past, you will never understand how narrow your view is today. Our field of view today is so constrained and so constricted because we’re locked into software and libraries.”
(RJ notes that people commonly assume that the diagrams attributed to icons like John Snow, Florence Nightingale, or William Playfair were drawn by their own hands; instead, they were typically designed by those individuals, but drawn by drafts-people.)
This means that the solutions that historic creators arrived at may have been natural for them, but they are decidedly not natural for us, simply because the tools we use today make it more difficult to visualize differently. “Software is great at scale — you can go fast, but you can only go fast in a certain direction,” RJ says, worrying that, with all the focus on tools, some of the craft of data visualization has been lost. In contrast, “Back then, it was harder to scale work, but it was a lot easier to be different.” That, RJ thinks, is a shame. Present-day data visualization designers could benefit from a little more innovation, a little more historic, hand-drawn inspiration.
The series tells stories that demand to be told, of people whose efforts have not received the recognition they deserve.
When I asked RJ how he chose the three creators to focus on for the Visionaries launch, he answered quickly: “What really drove the selection was what stories demanded to be told the most. These stories are absolutely spectacular.” He describes realizing he needed to write a book on Florence Nightingale after sinking hours into researching her story for the essay that launched Nightingale, the Journal of the Data Visualization Society. “She does this to anybody who gets interested in her,” RJ says. “She just sucks you in because her story is so fascinating.”
What’s something about Nightingale that drew RJ in? “The thing that nobody understands, has never understood, about her is — what did she actually do?” RJ describes piecing together from draft diagrams and letters written by Nightingale that, although she didn’t draw her iconic diagrams herself, she took on a clear editorial role. She gave directions for chart forms and data to use, critiqued others’ charts, made it apparent that she had a vision for the bigger picture.
And then, RJ explains, “I found it — a letter — Nightingale describing something to somebody with a diagram in a letter. You think, ‘Oh, all these diagrams that she published that are associated with her weren’t actually drawn by her. She directed that, she orchestrated that, she designed them, but they weren’t drawn by her hand.’” Spoiler alert: in the letter that RJ found, Nightingale included a hand-drawn — by her — diagram of population density, confirming “that she’s a visual thinker and even in private correspondence, she’s using diagrams to convey ideas.”
I also asked RJ about the fact that, notably for a field that tends to be male dominated today, two of the three data visualization creators that make up the Visionaries series are women. RJ pointed to two reasons for this. First, because Visionaries tells the stories of creators who have not received the attention they deserve, the historical bias towards telling men’s stories means that many of the leading candidates for this series were women. But the second, perhaps more surprising, reason is that many of the skills needed in early data visualization — like creativity, communications, and teamwork — were skills associated with women. “In the early 20th century, you have not only pioneering women doing great dataviz, but you have teams working together doing data visualization. It’s a whole part of our traditional history that has been underappreciated.”
Similarly, RJ emphasizes the continued underappreciation for work done in languages other than English. This English-language bias is one reason that the book on Étienne-Jules Marey will showcase Marey’s original writings in French, back-to-back with a first-ever English translation. Compared to the books on Willard and Nightingale, which will each be roughly 200 pages and split equally between text and artifacts, the book on Marey will be longer, and nearly 80% of it will be a republication and translation of Marey’s 1885 La Méthode Graphique. The double edition is crucial, from RJ’s perspective, not only for authenticity, but also for accessibility. Although Marey’s work has never before been published in English, it also hasn’t been published in French for almost 150 years.
A fundamental goal of the books is to demonstrate respect and appreciation for the creators they highlight, to spark inspiration.
RJ is a self-described huge book nerd who has spent a lot of time thinking about how this series can bolster our understanding and appreciation of data graphics. He identified two key gaps for the books to fill.
The first is the “modern scholarship” that accompanies the historical graphics. RJ worked with his expert editorial team to make sure that the books are full of new research and behind-the-scenes explanations to help readers better understand and appreciate the graphics.
The second gap is the graphics themselves. During our conversation, RJ pointed me to an image of Emma Willard’s iconic Temple of Time visualization. As I squinted at my screen trying to read it, he explained that, in Visionaries, iconic images like that one will be printed as full-size reproductions. “That’s a really important part of the story,” RJ notes, explaining that while some works are legible when printed book-sized, others are not. Willard’s Temple of Time, for example, is movie poster-sized in real life, rendering it inaccessible when printed on a standard page. Those full-size reproductions are, again, about highlighting the craft of data visualization and showing respect for the work and its creator in a way that can inspire the current generation of data visualization practitioners.
Along with those full-size reproductions, RJ emphasizes that the books will include complete visual catalogs of the works of their creators. “If you think of Florence Nightingale and you think of only one chart, that’s a problem because that chart is part of a series, and they’re meant to be read together. You don’t really know about the series unless you understand what she did before, the evolution of her design.” To that end, RJ and his team have pored through archival collections to identify every Willard graphic — including four other temple diagrams, one of which had never been studied before — and every Crimean war diagram created by Nightingale. The hope is that present-day data visualization practitioners can learn from observing their design processes.
Three books is only the beginning!
If this initial Kickstarter campaign is successful, RJ has big plans for the continuation of the series. “I have maybe 20–24 books in mind,” he admits.
Like what? As RJ points out, from a practical marketing perspective, the Visionaries series had to launch with books focusing on creators that readers are already somewhat familiar with, in order to ensure enough interest to fund the campaign. In the future, though, he wants to explore less well-known creators, including a more diverse set of visionaries from around the world. In particular, the English-language bias in data visualization means that there is a real opportunity to highlight historic figures who worked in other languages. “Going forward, I want to do a Japanese atlas, a German book, but I want to preserve the original language-” similar to how the book on Marey will preserve his original French- “because I believe that it’s more respectful; it’s more authentic. I think it makes the book more useful, honestly,” given that data visualization is a global practice.
“I have a very big appetite right now, big eyes, but I’m very focused on making these three incredible books happen.”
For more information on the Information Graphic Visionaries series, check out the launch page.
Claire Santoro is an information designer and science communicator with a passion for sustainability and the environment. For 10 years, Claire has worked with governmental agencies, non-profit organizations, and higher education to accelerate environmental action by communicating complex information in an engaging, approachable way. Claire holds an M.S. in environmental science from the University of Michigan.
