An exploration of infographics and data visualization as a cultural
phenomenon, from eighteenth-century print culture to today's data
journalism.
Infographics and data visualization are ubiquitous in our everyday media
diet, particularly in news--in print newspapers, on television news, and
online. It has been argued that infographics are changing what it means
to be literate in the twenty-first century--and even that they harmonize
uniquely with human cognition. In this first serious exploration of the
subject, Murray Dick traces the cultural evolution of the infographic,
examining its use in news--and resistance to its use--from
eighteenth-century print culture to today's data journalism. He
identifies six historical phases of infographics in popular culture: the
proto-infographic, the classical, the improving, the commercial, the
ideological, and the professional.
Dick describes the emergence of infographic forms within a wider history
of journalism, culture, and communications, focusing his analysis on the
UK. He considers their use in the partisan British journalism of late
eighteenth and early nineteenth-century print media; their later
deployment as a vehicle for reform and improvement; their mass-market
debut in the twentieth century as a means of explanation (and sometimes
propaganda); and their use for both ideological and professional
purposes in the post-World War II marketized newspaper culture. Finally,
he proposes best practices for news infographics and defends
infographics and data visualization against a range of criticism. Dick
offers not only a history of how the public has experienced and
understood the infographic, but also an account of what data
visualization can tell us about the past.
