Michael Friendly

Aiken code - Wikipedia

He also invented the Aiken code for digital displays bit.ly/3QUaAZf

Photo of Howard Aiken

Photo of the Harvard Mark I computer, built by IBM

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #OTD
🎂Mar 9, 1900 Howard H. Aiken born in Hoboken, NJ, USA 🇺🇸

1954: Harvard's Mark I, the first digital computer, put in service (with Grace Hopper)
The Mark I was 50 feet long and weighed ~ 5 tons.

Parent Duchatelet's 1836 choropleth map of France, showing the department from which prostitutes moved to Paris. Darker shading means more. The numbers in the map give the rank order of the departments.

Cover of Parent-Duchatelet's book on prostitutes in Paris, bearing the warning: "It is forbidden to sell this book to young people"

Oval B/W portrait of Alexandre Jean Baptiste Parent-Duchatelet

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #Onthisday #OTD 📊
💀Mar 7, 1836 Alexandre Jean Baptiste Parent-Duchatelet died in Paris, France 🇫🇷
1836: Extensive data tabulation, time series, and mapping of prostitutes in Paris
👀 Internet archive: bit.ly/3DrRUNl

Nice to have a vision and make it work!

The first photograph! "View from a window in le Gras" by Joseph Niepce. It is an ambiguous scene. At first glance, it appears to show a person standing on a balcony but could also be seen to show a white house on a hill in the distance.

A 1795 photograph of Joseph Nicephore Niepce

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #Onthisday #OTD 📊
🎂Mar 7, 1765 Joseph Nicephore Niepce born in Chalon-sur-Saone, France 🇫🇷

In 1827 he produced the first successful photograph (an 8-hour exposure!) with a type of asphalt on metal plates.

How bout:

Death on the NULL
cat() among the Pigeons
Murder on the R-ient Express

Map of France showing iso contours of elevation

Plaque in Marseilles installed as part of the Nivellement Général

#OTD 📊 Lallemand was also responsible for the Nivellement Général de la France, the process of mapping iso contours of elevation throughout the entire country.
You can still find the little disks/plaques installed most cities/towns/villages.

Lallemand’s L’Abaque Triomphe, a graphical calculator for determining compass course corrections for the ship, Le Triomphe. It is a stunning piece of work, combining measured values of magnetic variation around the world with eight magnetic parameters of the ship also measured experimentally, all into a very complicated formula for magnetic deviation calculable with a single diagram plus a transparent overlay

Photo of Charles Lallemand wearing medals representing his honors in the French Academy Royale

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #Onthisday #OTD 📊
🎂Mar 7, 1857 Charles Lallemand born in Saint-Aubin-sur-Aire, France 🇫🇷

1883: Combination of many variables into multi-function nomograms, using 3D, juxtaposition of maps, parallel coordinate and hexagonal grids
🔗 Paper: bit.ly/3HuHt9K

Recreation of Herschel's plot of position angle of twin stars \gamma Virginis over time from observations by multiple observers. Hershel smoothed the values using weights shown by the size of points.

B/W Photo of John Frederick W. Herschel (with wild, unruly hair)

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #Onthisday #OTD 📊
🎂Mar 7, 1792 John Frederick W. Herschel born in Slough, Buckinghamshire, England 🇬🇧

1833: Herschel invented the essential idea of the modern scatterplot
~1835: Contribs to photography, incl the cyanotype (blueprint)
🔗 bit.ly/3ToWpNM

GitHub Actions are Forever

Title page of Nouvelles Methodes pour la Determination des Orbites des Cometes

This portrait is claimed to be that of Adrien Marie Legendre, but is disputed in other sources.

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #Onthisday #OTD 📊
📅Mar 6, 1805 Adrien Marie Legendre introduces least squares in his Nouvelles Methodes pour la Determination des Orbites des Cometes

The Upshot is hiring a data graphics/multimedia editor. Come work with us and make weird things that help people understand the world!
job-boards.greenhouse.io/thenewyorkti...

Artistic portrait of William Oughtred in front of a slide rule. The large X refers to multiplication, not a social media platform

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #Onthisday #OTD 📊
🎂Mar 5, 1574 William Oughtred born in Eton, England 🇬🇧

~1620: Along with Edmund Gunter, he invented a calculating device with logarithmic & trigonometric scales, an early form of slide rule for mariners.📏

Some sample nestedLogit plots.

Yes, another quirky favorite of mine

Release Add vignettes & plotting enhancements · friendly/nestedLogit nestedLogit 0.4.0 This is a major release of the package adding considerable functionality for plotting and other features add gators data, food choice of alligators from Agresti added a vignette ...

A major release of the nestedLogit package now on CRAN.
Enhanced plotting methods, several new vignettes...
[Work on this a tribute to John Fox, who did the heavy lifting on the package, in both theory & code]
Release notes: github.com/friendly/nes...
Docs: friendly.r-universe.dev/nestedLogit

Here's another bendy-bar chart, from the Album de Statistique Graphique, (Emile Cheysson, 1886), D'Epenses de Premier Etablissement des Chemins de Fer du Monde en 1883.

#dataviz #history
I like the idea of network diagrams trying to show the influence of people in different area (philosophy / science / art) on each other. Does anyone know of any good things in this category?

Agree entirely. Mercator solved a problem for
european navigators. He wasn't concerned so much for geographic 'equity' of representation. And, he left a whole bunch of interesting problems for other geographic geometers to deal with.

A digital CAPTCHA verification window titled "Select all squares with PIPES" against a plain white background. The window contains a 3×3 grid of numbered squares, mixing literal hardware, smoking pipes, and programming syntax.

These captchas just keep getting harder #rstats

An early world map using the Mercator projection, which makes the northern hemisphere appear lager. It takes the form of two circular maps, one for N/S America, the other for Africa/Europe/Asia

Portrait of Gerardus Mercator

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #Onthisday #OTD 📊
🎂Mar 5, 1512 Gerardus Mercator born in Rupelmonde, Flanders, Belgium 🇧🇪

1569: he Invented of cylindrical projection for portraying the globe on maps, to preserve straightness of rhumb lines
(for better or worse, but it helped Europeans navigate the seas)

#TodayinHistory #OTD 📊
Marey's studies of motion look so modern!
He solved the age old Q: Why does a cat nearly always fall on its feet?

Étienne-Jules Marey, The Graphic Method “These views have taught us to discern the appearances of reality.”— Étienne-Jules Marey, 1878 OverviewÉtienne-Jules Marey revealed to the human eye what it cannot naturally see; changing not only sci...

#TodayinHistory #OTD 📊
🎂Mar 5, 1830 Etienne-Jules Marey born in Beaune, France 🇫🇷
In 1878, Marey made the first attempt to survey, describe, and illustrate available graphic methods for experimental data
& pioneered the study of animal motion. He was a giant of #dataviz
Get the book: bit.ly/41AfMEK

Can't wait to dive into this 2nd Ed. of a really great book.

Hard to believe CRAN accepted a package with such a similar name to the widely used 'colorspace' 📦

B/W photo of Alban William Housego Phillips

Plot of the rate of change of wage rates on the Y axis vs. unemployment. The inverse relation suggest a tradeoff

The cyclic relationship becomes clearer when the points are connected in time order

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #Onthisday #OTD 📊
💀Mar 4, 1975 Alban William Housego Phillips died in Auckland, New Zealand 🇳🇿

1958: The "Phillips Curve,'' a scatterplot of inflation vs. unemployment over time shows a strong inverse relation, leading to important developments in macroeconomic theory

Credit Where Credit is Due: Mary Eleanor Spear Exploring the life and work of an overlooked mid-century dataviz pioneer who may have discovered the Box Plot 17 years before John Tukey.

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #Onthisday #OTD 📊
🎂Mar 4, 1897 Mary Eleanor Spear born in Jonesboro, Indiana, USA 🇺🇸

A data vis specialist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, she pioneered the boxplot and wrote books on effective graphic techniques (done by hand!)
👀 bit.ly/4baeFSY

WOW!

This is a great find!
1828-- Not long after Dupin published his first b/w choropleth (1826)
The use of color is subtle; uses what looks like a nice color ramp, but actually colored patterns. Great detail shown
I never heard of the cartographer -- F. von Doring