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Episode #159: Sandra Rendgen
184 Plays5 years ago
Sandra Rendgen is an author, consultant and concept developer with a focus on data visualization, interactive media and the history of infographics. She is the author of several books about historical and current developments in the field, most recently History...
The post Episode #159: Sandra Rendgen appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction of Podcast and Guest
00:00:11
Speaker
Hi everyone, welcome back to the Policy Viz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. And on this week's episode, I'm really happy to talk with Sarah Rengan, who's written a couple of recent books, the biggest one being The History of Information Graphics. And when I say biggest, I mean,
00:00:27
Speaker
really size. I mean it's a great book but it's also like it's a Taschen book. If you've ever purchased a Taschen book you'll know that they're basically like a mile long and two miles wide. It's just a huge book but it is a visual
00:00:43
Speaker
feast on the history of data visualization. And she also has a book on Charles Joseph Menard and his statistics of graphics. So I'm really excited to chat with her in this week's episode.
Policy Viz Shop Announcement
00:00:55
Speaker
Before I share that interview with you, just a quick note.
00:01:00
Speaker
that I've added two new things to the PolicyViz shop. The first is a set of thank you cards that I created kind of out of fun. I mean, they're all out of fun, really. It's just a series of data visualizations on one side of the card with a big old thank you.
00:01:16
Speaker
And on the backside is a definition of the graph with some other sort of watermark graphics in the back. And then I also put out a series of postcards using historical famous data visualizations. And of course, one of those is the Menard Napoleon map. So if you'd like to check those out, please head on over to the policyvis shop. And if you use the code podcast, you can get 10% off your purchase. So please do head on over to the shop and check that out.
Chat Preview with Sarah Rengan
00:01:45
Speaker
So as I mentioned on this week's episode of the show, I chat with Sarah Rengan. We talk about her books and we also talk about historical data visualization more generally.
00:01:56
Speaker
Sarah's work along with the recent W.E. Du Bois book, Jason Forrest who's doing a lot of writing about historical data visualization along with RJ Andrews and a whole bunch of people. And so we talk a little bit about how looking back at the history of data visualization can help us in an era of computers and mobile phones and big data and what it means for us as creators of data visualizations. So I hope you will enjoy this week's episode of the show. And here is my interview with Sandra.
Sarah's Background and Writing Journey
00:02:29
Speaker
Hi, Sandra. Thanks for coming on the show. How are you? I'm fine. Thank you, John, for having me. I'm slowly winding down summertime, getting ready for the fall. And you have had a busy what, like nine months at least of things coming out in the world, but a busier like, I'm sure like 18, 24 months before that.
00:02:49
Speaker
Yeah, at least. I mean, the whole period of getting things together, of course, stretches back a lot longer. But yeah, two books came out in the past nine months and I'm very happy about those two products. Yeah.
00:03:04
Speaker
Yeah, that's great. And I want to talk about both of them. And we'll also make sure we give people the warning about the Tashin book if they don't know they haven't bought books. But maybe we can start, you can talk a little bit about about yourself, the work that you do. And then maybe we just slide right into, you know, how you got started on, I want to talk about both the book. So I mean, if you want to start about the Menard book, we can talk about how you got interested in that one. So
00:03:31
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So yeah, maybe a little bit of background. I was educated as an art historian, which is a bit, maybe a bit of strange approach to the field. But it makes sense in that I was always interested in, you know, in visuals and how they work, what they could do have, you know, what they tell us and what their
00:03:52
Speaker
their potentials are. And at some point I started to get interested in infographics and published two books with Taschen Publishing before.
Interest in Historical Data Visualization
00:04:02
Speaker
And those were more surveys of what's happening in contemporary work, what's happening in the field, like right now, the burst that we're seeing. And once I got started to look into the field, I also got interested in looking into the history, because what I really noticed was that, you know, as we are growing as a professional field, like database, the community and the people who are
00:04:28
Speaker
interested in visual analytics and in data visualization. And as this field is growing and growing together from a variety of backgrounds, I felt that there's a lot of interest and a lot of desire in understanding where this field comes from, where the roots are. And this is sort of what got me started in looking into historical examples.
Analysis of the Napoleon Map
00:04:51
Speaker
And then very quickly I sort of noticed that, you know, there's a few highlights and a few milestones and a few heroes that we always sort of cite and that we always look back to. But, you know, there's the field and the history is much broader and much more colorful and interesting and there's much more details to know.
00:05:12
Speaker
And yeah that's sort of what got me started and the Minara is a pretty good example because the one thing or the one example that we all know about and that we always hear about is the Napoleon map of course just sort of you know the famous graphic that's always
00:05:29
Speaker
being mentioned when there's talk about the history of infographics. But this is just one of many, many works, and it's also the end of his professional and personal evolution in terms of his data, his research. And I knew that there's
00:05:47
Speaker
There's a big collection of statistical graphics that he prepared and that he made over the course of his career and that those were just hidden. I would always Google and try to find something and there would always be just very small thumbnails and you wouldn't really see anything online or wouldn't really find anything.
00:06:05
Speaker
And so I thought it would really be worth to go to the archive and dig up all this material and the whole collection of his works, basically, and just try to understand how he got there and how he arrived at producing this great map and this great graphic. Because it's interesting to understand that the Napoleon graphic is sort of very special within his work, right? It's almost the last work that he did out of
00:06:35
Speaker
you know, 60 large format statistical maps. This is one of the last he did. And also it's a bit different than the other ones he did. It's also interesting, and I didn't know this before reading the book, that the Napoleon map is kind of like part two of this bigger spread with the Hannibal march at the top.
Menard’s Storytelling Approach
00:06:55
Speaker
Yes, exactly. And that is an interesting feature that we can observe throughout his work, that he would try to compare situations or compare developments, right? Sometimes he would compare developments like a specific data set, how it evolves over time. Or in this case, he would compare a data set that is sort of equal, like a military campaign that stretches over several months.
00:07:23
Speaker
and then he would compare the Hannibal, which is from antiquity, so way back when, we don't know very much about it, but we have a few raw numbers. And so he compared that with another military disaster, which was way bigger, and that's the Napoleon. And so, yeah, and what is very important and very interesting is that he constructed both flows, I mean, both flow maps, that is the...
00:07:51
Speaker
format that he developed and that he is famous for. And he constructed both flows to the same scale on the original map. So you can look in one glance, you don't have to calculate or anything in one glance, you can see, you know, this is the relation between the numbers that are shown. Yeah, you can compare the two over the two, the two errors that is that is interesting.
00:08:13
Speaker
Can you talk about what the process was like to find the originals? And like you said, I mean, you Google them and you don't really find a lot. So what was your process like to find the original images? Yeah, there were a few researchers before me who have done some sort of basic work, which was really helpful. Like the Canadian researcher, Michael Friendly, he had already put it together, a list of his work. And what I knew from Michael and from Jill Palsky, a French historian,
00:08:43
Speaker
is that Minard, he has studied and later taught at one specific technical college in Paris, the École des Poinschussies, the School of Bridges and Roads. So it's an engineering college. And so he was closely connected to that school for pretty much all of his life. And I knew that they had like a comprehensive collection of all of his work. So I knew that from the research that was done before me.
00:09:10
Speaker
So I basically got in touch with them and went to the archive and just looked at all the work, original in paper, which was really fascinating and brilliant because that gives you another very tactile experience of how they've worked, right?
00:09:28
Speaker
seeing what they did in digital format or, you know, reproduced in a book is very interesting and very enlightening. But then sitting there and seeing the actual print that is many, most of them are hand colored, like after printing and seeing these technical details and the actual format is really enlightening and really fascinating. So yeah.
00:09:52
Speaker
Yeah, that's really neat. Um, before we turn to the infographics book, I would be remiss if I didn't ask you about Tufti's take on the Minard Napoleon mark. So like, you know, so Tufti says it's, it's the greatest statistical graphic ever drawn. So, so is that your, is that your perspective? Yeah.
Creation of 'The History of Information Graphics'
00:10:10
Speaker
Well,
00:10:11
Speaker
First of all, I want to say it's really Tufti's achievement that he made us look at historical pieces, right? I mean, his books are interspersed with historical examples all throughout and that's really fascinating and I think that many of us are hooked on this topic because of his books and he also researched a lot of material.
00:10:33
Speaker
Personally for the quote that you just mentioned, you said probably the best. I think it's probably the best. I'm always worried to say something is the best or the first, it's always difficult, but it is absolutely stunning and significant and striking. And my take on that is what is really interesting and fascinating is that it shows how Minar had evolved some sort of
00:11:02
Speaker
storytelling skills. That's my take on it, because if you look at how his work evolved, like he's tried several, like a variety of different data sets and he's tried which data sets he can combine, which makes, you know, a useful visualization. Some of his works are really cluttered in some way, you know, so he tries several methods over time and then arrives at the Napoleon with skills. And one of that skill is to understand and to see
00:11:31
Speaker
How can I form a story out of the whole disaster? Looking at this whole disaster, it's a very complex story. It's six months, many, many different army units that have moved in many, many different directions. One of them moved here, back there, they stayed there.
00:11:52
Speaker
They stayed for some time and then they moved back. So there's a lot of different movements and he streamlined that into one statistical variable that he watched over time. And that is very interesting. And that's why this whole story is so intriguing and telling and striking.
00:12:10
Speaker
And in this respect, I think it's very, very interesting and brilliant.
Impact of Historical Visualizations on Today
00:12:16
Speaker
What is interesting in the context of his work is that for him it was sort of, for him it's almost sort of casual because his earlier works that are more, you know, they're more related to transport issues or
00:12:30
Speaker
issues of trade and commerce and that's like real data for him. He gives us the sources, he tells us how the data is calculated and where he aggregated and where data was missing. For that one, for the Napoleon one, interestingly, he didn't do that.
00:12:47
Speaker
I don't know why exactly. I don't know if it was because he was too old or whether he thought it was like edutainment sort of. This gives us the books. But if you look into the books, they have, you know, tables here and tables there. He must have done heavy calculations to come up with the numbers. But we don't see that anywhere really.
00:13:08
Speaker
But this one feels like you said, it feels a little bit more like a story. Yeah. Because you have this, especially the Napoleon one, you have this, you know, starts from the left, you sort of follow it, you see this sort of like climax point as it gets to the right, and then you turn back around. And it says this, it does sort of follow your, you know, your kind of traditional model of story in some way. But it's that it's that visual representation without necessarily writing all the words and annotation the way you would in a book.
00:13:36
Speaker
Yeah, very much. I feel like his skills were coming together with... It's a very lucky coincidence of many things, I would say. It's his skills, it's his interest in this historical disaster, like the whole thing was 50 years ago when he did the map. But then also the fact that the army was moving
00:14:04
Speaker
Eastwards at first is very lucky for him. It's fortunate because this is the classic reading direction. We start in the east, we start in the west and then read towards the east, right? And in Moscow we turn back and then follow the faster even more and then follow the temperature along the bottom.
00:14:23
Speaker
So, yeah, like a lucky coincidence of many, many things and brilliant storytelling I would say. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let's turn to the history of information graphics book, which I think the first thing that people need to know is that it's a Taschen book.
00:14:41
Speaker
it weighs about 400 pounds and it's like bigger than my desk so just be prepared yeah you better be prepared but yeah we hope that it's uh it makes you dive into you know it should be an immersive experience i guess that's the idea behind it yeah well i want to let you talk about the process and how it was pulled together but i did also want to ask whether you view it as
00:15:10
Speaker
a book that you think people should read, you know, cover to cover or was it one of those books like more of like a coffee table book where just open it to a random page and just enjoy the visual and read the text that's around each peak.
00:15:23
Speaker
Oh, that's a good question, I guess, or my hope would be that it enables both. And we took a long time to figure the structure of the book, like how are you going to tell the story? First of all, I have to say I consider it as the contribution that I want to make is to try to bring a lot of material to our common
00:15:53
Speaker
attention and knowledge. Because as I mentioned before, I feel like there's a few heroes that we keep mentioning and that are certainly important. But I want everybody to know that there's so much more to discover. And I myself was really surprised to see, you know, at first I was like,
00:16:12
Speaker
Yes, you know, this is the book format that I was trying to fill. It's a big book, but I'm pretty sure that I'm going to find enough material for the book. What happened during my research was I found material for like 10 books this size. There is so much out there. There's so much material that we have, and we are not aware of that story, of that history. And this is what I want to make people aware of.
00:16:39
Speaker
This is the first contribution that I want to make, right? There are these heroes that many of us already know. Let me quote Nightingale, Otto Neurad, and all these figures, well-known and very important, but there's so much more. These figures are just sort of the icebergs looking out of the ocean, but there's so much more.
00:17:03
Speaker
As to your question, I mean, the structure is modular, so most of it comes in self-contained pieces. If you can just dive in and look at one piece and there's going to be an explanation that tells you about this one piece and that there's brief summaries as to epochs, we have chosen a chronological structure so you can sort of wander from the middle ages towards the present.
00:17:28
Speaker
And I would like to mention that I have also invited four experts that have been busy in this field or have been active in research in the history of information graphics or various aspects for many, many years, long before me. And I wanted to include their, you know, introduce, include their knowledge to the book as well and make readers aware that there's these experts who have their own collections.
00:17:56
Speaker
so that the readers, you know, might go out and go online and find their material as well. Right. Yeah. So what was the process like for this one? So for the Menard book, you were able to go and pick out the original materials. But this one is, you know, a total count of graphs in it. So what was that process like?
00:18:22
Speaker
Yeah, it just was a bit less concise or a bit less concentrated that just stretched over many years. I had the idea of doing this book a long time ago and then Tashna and I talked about doing it, whether it would be feasible and
00:18:41
Speaker
And then, as time went by, we just go and look for stuff. How do you say? If you have your attention focused on that, you find things everywhere and then you start collecting. And this is what I did over many years, not many, but five years, continuously trying to find things in very different contexts. It's very interesting. Once you start looking for things, you find examples in the most weird places and in the most weird contexts. For instance, there's
Critical View of Historical Graphics
00:19:10
Speaker
some
00:19:10
Speaker
an historical infographic made by the Berlin, I live in Berlin, so there's a Berlin, you know, metro subway company Befauge, and they have shown two historical infographics that come from an annual report that they made in back in the 20s, in the late 20s,
00:19:29
Speaker
And they just have it up on the wall, very big, on one station. And once I walked by there, and I was like, hey, look at this, what is this? And so this is, you know, this is the, they sort of, once you have your attention on, clicked on, turned on, then the pieces also come to you, people will show you stuff, send you stuff. And so it's been a very long collection process. And so this is the first part. And then of course, the second
00:19:54
Speaker
Even more difficult part is to make a selection from that. And I have to mention what has really helped the process is that we are in the middle of the digitization process and many archives and many libraries are putting their stuff online. So many, many libraries have searchable collections online and that has really helped. I couldn't have done this without this. Like 10 years ago, it would have been much more difficult.
00:20:23
Speaker
Right, right. Well, I have it on my desk at home. And so I had to clear off a whole section of the space. But so both of these books are looking at historical visualizations. And so there has been, I think, like you mentioned earlier, a bit of a refocusing or more attention paid to some of the historical work. So there's the Du Bois book that came out I think last year. Yeah. Jason Forrest has been writing a lot about it. RJ Andrews has his book out that has a lot of
00:20:53
Speaker
historical looks. And I'm curious, you know, aside from the basic inspiration and just kind of, and also, you know, seeing the different techniques, I wonder how you think about knowing more about the historical visualizations helps us today when we're designing interactives and we're working on mobile phones. And so when you think about these books and the other work that people are doing
00:21:19
Speaker
And people who are making modern visualizations, how do you think about linking those two together? I mean, technology is certainly, you know, an aspect that sort of separates us or for many that feeling has evolved, right? That the technologies that we have now sort of, you know, separate us from anything that's happened before in print or whatever.
00:21:43
Speaker
But my take on that is that it's mostly about sort of critical education in our minds. That's what I think is most important about it. Because when you look at historical works, many things will look strange to us. And this is a good thing because then you have to think about
00:22:02
Speaker
Who did this? Why does this look so strange? What did they try to achieve? Also things like who paid for this? Was it self-initiated or did someone commission that work? What is the message? What is the underlying? What is the thought behind it? And I think it's engaging with historical works that we train to ask these questions.
00:22:26
Speaker
And you are aware that there's been a lot of talk lately and the database community about fostering a culture of criticism and a culture of critically judging works, but also giving candid feedback, constructive criticism. And I think for acquiring a critical mindset like that, it's really enlightening to engage with historical works just because it opens your perspective. It opens your mind, right?
00:22:56
Speaker
Because for many works that we see that, you know, contemporary work from like today, with many of these, we share, you know, basic values, basic aesthetics, basic principles and stuff. With historical works, that is not always given. So I understand it's a very good training for us to develop a critical mindset for looking at at work.
00:23:18
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I also find it interesting how people sometimes take these historical, especially the famous historical ones and they remake them in the modern tools. Yeah. And I wonder whether you've given any thought to that. Like, is that merely a technical exercise or is there more to it than that? Because I do wonder whether people then have to think more carefully about the visualization rather than saying, oh, the Menard graph, you know, goes left to right and then right to left and you know, but you have to dive a little bit deeper if you're going to remake something.
00:23:47
Speaker
Absolutely. I mean, the whole method of redesigning things or remaking things. I mean, redesign is something different than just recreating things. But I think it always makes people understand
00:24:00
Speaker
you know, how things came together or understand how some design choices were made and why they may have been made like that or may have been made. Was there any other choice than doing it this way or that way? So I guess there's absolutely a good point in doing that. Yeah, and certainly it's right. Your question is good because it's certainly even more intense than just looking at it and just talking about it. It's different when you actually have to
00:24:30
Speaker
you know recreate it or find another solution for saying the same thing, then you will understand the tricky parts behind it. So yeah, absolutely.
00:24:42
Speaker
Yeah, that would be an interesting project for like Makeover Monday or the tiny Tuesday projects. Like remake Menard's map and see what you can come up with. Yeah, that would be fun. And I guess it's probably two part to be really enlightening to first really look at the thing. That's an interesting point that when I teach
00:25:02
Speaker
I sort of torment my students with having to look at the same graphic for a very long time.
Unique Medieval Infographic
00:25:09
Speaker
It's something that I had to do in my art history classes back in university, like our professors would make us look at the same painting for an hour and I would be like, can we just
00:25:20
Speaker
Can we just take this away? I've seen this now, but it's so enlightening. It always gets you somewhere, and I'm doing this with graphics as well, and I think this is something that we don't do enough. Really take the time to analyze a piece.
00:25:36
Speaker
And, you know, this is always, for me, the first part when looking at a historical piece, like, for instance, with the Minaro Napoleon map, like, you'd understand where did you get the data from? Like, well, did he have to calculate them? Or were they somewhere? And, and it turns out he must have calculated them, but he doesn't talk about it anywhere. Things like that. So understand and analyze that first, and then try to remake something or recreate something. And so that would be very enlightening. Yeah.
00:26:04
Speaker
Yeah. Um, okay. So, so you have, I don't know, hundreds of, of historical graphics that you've, you've looked at and is there one that you can pick out as your favorite or maybe a top five? Oh, I'll make it easier if I give you a top five. No, it's always, always so difficult, but I'll give you an unexpected one. Okay. One that I'm really in love with is, um, it's a, it's a parchment roll from
00:26:34
Speaker
the year 1200 AD, roundabout. We don't know exactly when it was from. The apartment role itself is in the Harvard Library today and it's seven meters long or something. It's got a fold out in the Middle Ages chapter of the book and
00:26:54
Speaker
it's just this absolutely crazy genealogy. It's got bubbles and then the bubbles are connected with each other and within this genealogy it tells the yeah basically the story of the biblical story from you know from Adam and Eve all the way down to Jesus and then it has all it has little texts in them and little uh icons and the bubbles and I'm just absolutely intrigued by
00:27:18
Speaker
how the theologians at the time managed to condense the very intricate theological Christian story into this whole parchment roll. And then what is also interesting in that is it wasn't copied in this or that many examples or copies, it was printed. So this thing is unique and then somebody else would copy it by just
00:27:43
Speaker
you know, making a hand, a manual copy and then making little adjustments. So from the from the examples that we have, every piece is, you know, a little different. A little different. Yeah. So you can see the more or less kind of the evolution of the of the piece. Yeah, very. So this is this is a special thing with the manuscript culture back in the Middle Ages. This is something that we, you know, it's for me, it's really hard to wrap my head around this because we're so used to standardization and print and
00:28:12
Speaker
you know, exact copies and that just didn't respect them. So, yeah. Wow. That's great. Yeah. Well, I've enjoyed both the books.
Conclusion and Book Recommendations
00:28:21
Speaker
I'm only, you know, ankle deep in the information graphics one, but yeah, they're great. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. It's been, it's been really interesting talking about this. Thank you so much, John. I really hope that you enjoy the book even further. And yeah, thanks so much for inviting me. Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks so much.
00:28:44
Speaker
And thanks to you all for tuning in once again to this week's episode. I hope you enjoyed that discussion. I hope you will check out these books. They're really great and the history of information graphics, you're going to have to carve out some space on your bookshelf to put it there. But it is a beautiful book, as I mentioned earlier. So if you'd like to support the show, please do share it with folks. Please put a review on
00:29:09
Speaker
iTunes or or Google Play or wherever you like to listen to the show and if you'd like to Support the show financially, please head over to my patreon page just for one or three bucks a month You can support the show and you can also get a lovely policy of his podcast mug for your morning coffee or tea and That really wraps up this week's episode. I've got more coming for you over the next few months I'm really excited with some of the guests that I have lined up for you and
00:29:39
Speaker
So until next time, this has been the policy of this podcast. Thanks so much for listening.