(Roughly) Daily

Fish and loaves fresco from the Catacombs of St. Callixto, Rome, c. 200. Christian iconography appeared in the first third of the third century. It quickly developed a clear vocabulary—an image of a fisherman represented Jesus Christ and the apostles, a fish under a breadbasket represented communion, and the superimposed Greek letters Χ (chi) and Ρ (rho), sometimes called the Christogram or monogram of Christ, represented Christ himself (Χ and Ρ are the first two letters in the Greek word for Christ, Christos). Early Christians used these and other symbols in mural paintings, catacomb frescoes, and sarcophagi carvings to label deceased Christians. Sixteen popes are buried in the catacombs of San Callixto, located on the Appian Way in Rome.

Although Éric de Grolier, the so-called Father of Information Systems in France, coined the term infographic in 1979, the history of the graphical representation of information stretches back much further. The history of the visualization of information is intrinsically tied to the history of human cognition, of technology, and of art and design. Human beings have used visuals for so many things: to communicate ideas and stories; to represent space, time, and the cosmos; to extrapolate and compare sets of data; to show connections and disparities; to teach complex concepts or succinctly display information. Visualizations—maps, diagrams, graphs—make arguments for how we should understand the world, and thereby teach us how to understand, organize, and make sense of complicated reality. These simplified versions of the world allow us to see things that are usually unseen: the borders between political jurisdictions, the hierarchy of an organization, or the relationship between the mortal plane and the afterlife…

A fascinating history of the visual expression of ideas: “Instead of Writing a Thousand Words, Part One: Ideas, Part Two: Maps, and Part Three: Data.”

* Blaise Pascal

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As we show, not tell, we might recall that it was on this date in 1796, at the Swan Inn in Dunkerton (England), that William Smith, a self-educated geologist, wrote in a single sentence his discovery of the mode of identifying strata by the organized fossils respectively imbedded therein (the theory of of stratigraphy)– now an axiomatic fact of modern geological knowledge.  He went on to publish (in 1799) the first large-scale geological map of the area around Bath, Somerset.

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