![]() It was recently recreated in Tableau by Satoshi Ganeko and featured as the Tableau Viz of the Day yesterday. The original diagram was published in Contribution to the Sanitary History of the British Army (1859). In our first episode, I showed a redesign of the famous Florence Nightingale Rose Chart. Last month, Steve Wexler and I did our first Chart Chat episode and you can sign up for our second episode here. Statistics should be the dryest of all reading.” Fortunately, she ignored him.A Redesign of Florence Nightingale's Rose Chart “You complain that your report would be dry. “We do not want impressions, we want facts,” Farr wrote to her in 1861. Not everyone thought it was right to include such fripperies in a sober publication. Nightingale hoped her charts would liven up her publications the queen, she thought, might look at the pictures, even if she did not read the words. ![]() #FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE GRAPH SERIES#He was the first in a series of economists, statisticians and social reformers who wanted to use data not only to inform but also to persuade and even campaign-and who understood that when the eye comprehends, the heart often follows. “This method has struck several persons as being fallacious”, he wrote, “because geometrical measurement has not any relation to money or to time yet here it is made to represent both.” Using the horizontal and vertical axes to represent time and money was such a novelty that he had to explain it painstakingly in accompanying text. Statisticians have used his data to plot wages divided by prices (showing how much wheat a week's wages would buy) against time, and the point becomes clear-as, incidentally, does a more subtle one: the increase in buying power was slowing down.Īnd Playfair was already making a leap of abstraction that few of his contemporaries could follow. Still, he should not be overly criticised for this. Presumably he was not familiar with the idea of combining two variables-prices and wages-to make a third-affordability. It is a little difficult to see the point Playfair wished to make: “that never at any former period was wheat so cheap, in proportion to mechanical labour as it is at the present time”. This chart, his most famous, shows the “weekly wages of a good mechanic” and the “price of a quarter of wheat”, with the reigns of monarchs displayed along the top. He was the first to show imports and exports on one chart, shading the area between the two to indicate the balance of trade and explaining that the intersection of the lines showed a shift in favour of one country or the other. He drew a chart comparing tax levels in various countries in order to show that Britain's was too high. Alongside these many and varied skills he was also an engraver (he produced some of James Watt's engineering drawings), which explains this image's handsomeness, with its delicate shading and ornate attribution. It was published in 1821 by William Playfair, a Scottish engineer, political economist and scoundrel: he was convicted of libel in England and swindling in France. The chart to the left is the earliest of our three. Edward Tufte, whose book, “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” is a bible to statisticians, calls it “the best statistical graphic ever drawn”. He was 80 years old and long retired when, in 1861, he called on the innovative techniques he had invented for the purpose of displaying flows of people, in order to tell the tragic tale in a single image. It was drawn half a century afterwards by Charles Joseph Minard, a French civil engineer who worked on dams, canals and bridges. The chart to the left also tells the story of a war: Napoleon's Russian campaign of 1812. The numbers of deaths from the various causes are not stated-although, to be fair, it was their relative size that Nightingale wished to show. The red, black and blue wedges are all measured from the centre, so some areas mask parts of others. Nightingale's chart is a beautiful and persuasive call to action, but it is not perfect. She sent the chart to the War Office and it is a fair assumption that it contributed to the improvements in military hospitals that she brought about. Her principal message-that even during periods of heavy fighting, such as November 1854, far more soldiers died from infection than from wounds-can be seen at a glance. ![]() As with today's pie charts, the area of each wedge is proportional to the figure it stands for, but it is the radius of each slice (the distance from the common centre to the outer edge) rather than the angle that is altered to achieve this. The chart displays the causes of the deaths of soldiers during the Crimean war, divided into three categories: “Preventible or Mitigable Zymotic Diseases” (infectious diseases, including cholera and dysentery, coloured in blue), “wounds” (red) and “all other causes” (black). ![]()
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