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Graph drawn by W.E.B. Du Bois displaying the income and expenditure of Black American families in Atlanta.

How W.E.B. Du Bois Disrupted America’s Dominance at the World’s Fair

With bar graphs and pie charts, the sociologist and his Atlanta students demonstrated Black excellence in the face of widespread discrimination.
by Susannah Gardiner via Smithsonian on February 1, 2023
Antoni Jażwiński’s Tableau Muet, based on the original “Polish System” for charting historical information, later revised in France and the United States, 1834

Visualizing History: The Polish System

For the Polish educator Antoni Jażwiński, history was best represented by an abstract grid.
by Adam Green, Hunter Dukes via The Public Domain Review on May 5, 2021
A visualization of the Great Migration depicting individual journeys with lines between cities.

The Great Migration

1915 marked the beginning of the largest domestic migration in American history. Hundreds of thousands of Black Americans began relocating north.
by Will Donnell via wcd.fyi on February 20, 2021
COVID-19 dashboard
partner

Covid-19 Dashboards Are Vital, Yet Flawed, Sources of Public Information

Unlike our car dashboards, covid-19 dashboards do not give individuals actionable information.
by Jacqueline Wernimont via Made By History on January 26, 2021

Emma Willard's Maps of Time

The pioneering work of Emma Willard, a leading feminist educator whose innovative maps of time laid the groundwork for the charts and graphics of today.
by Susan Schulten via The Public Domain Review on January 22, 2020

Plug in Your Address to See How It's Changed Over the Past 750 Million Years

You can hone in on a specific location and visualize how it has evolved between the Cryogenian Period and the present.
by Meilan Solly via Smithsonian on February 15, 2019

Network Visualisations Show What We Can and What We May Know

On the intellectual history of the lines and arrows that have become a standard feature of the news media.
by Christopher Warren via Aeon on June 18, 2018

How Women Mapped the Upheaval of 19th Century America

The second part in a series exploring little-seen contributions to cartography.
by Laura Bliss via CityLab on March 23, 2016
Graph depicting deaths from cholera in New York City in 1849

Infographics in the Time of Cholera

To inform its readers of a cholera epidemic, The New York Tribune published an ancestor to our current infographics.
by Scott Klein via ProPublica on March 16, 2016
Scientists attend to banks of monitors at NASA's Mission Control Center in Houston in 1965.

Mission Control: A History of the Urban Dashboard

Futuristic control rooms with endless screens of blinking data are proliferating in cities across the globe. Welcome to the age of Dashboard Governance.
by Shannon Mattern via Places Journal on March 1, 2015
Illustration of man throwing football to sports broadcaster.

Before and After the Contest: Wraparound Sportscasting Through the Ages

National Football League pre- and postgame shows have become a testing ground for novel technology in the waning days of linear television.
by Chloe Lizotte via Mubi on August 1, 2024
Doodles, flourishes and scribbles drawn by George Washington.

Doodle Nation: Notes on Distracted Drawing

Humans have doodled for as long as they have written and drawn, but psychoanalysis began to imagine the doodle as a key to understanding the unconscious mind.
by Polly Dickson via The Paris Review on July 17, 2024
Syntactic trees filled with words and numbers.

American Grammar: Diagraming Sentences in the 19th Century

A pre-history of the sentence diagrams that were once commonplace in the American classroom.
by Hunter Dukes via The Public Domain Review on June 19, 2024
1970 Map of the United States Interstate Highway Plan

How Black Activists Have Long Used Mapmaking to Document Culture and Racism in the U.S.

The neglected history of Black mapmaking in America and the creative ways in which Black people have historically used mapping to tell stories.
by Derek H. Alderman, Joshua F. J. Inwood via PBS NewsHour on February 17, 2024
Visualization showing the largest cities in the US, from the Statistical Atlas of the Eleventh Census, 1790-1890

Growing New England's Cities

What can a visualization of population growth in cities and towns in the Northeast tell us about different moments in the region's economic geography?
by Garrett Dash Nelson via Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center on March 17, 2023
Redlining map from the 1930s

The Tyranny Of The Map: Rethinking Redlining

In trying to understand one of the key aspects of structural racism, have we constructed a new moralistic story that obscures more than it illuminates?
by Robert Gioielli via The Metropole on November 3, 2022
Redlined street map of the Baltimore area.

The Mapping of Race in America

Visualizing the legacy of slavery and redlining, 1860 to the present.
by Anika Fenn Gilman, Catherine Discenza, John Hessler via Library of Congress on July 28, 2022
Daguerrotype of Robert Cornelius.

Portraits of Brotherly Love

Philadelphia portrait studios in the Age of the Daguerreotype (1840-1849).
by Rachel Wetzel via Library of Congress on July 1, 2022
Graph of the data from the genome study, in which every data point is represented by a line which connects to other lines to show family trees

Largest Human Family Tree Identifies Nearly 27 Million Ancestors

Researchers create massive genealogical network dating back 100,000 years
by David Kindy via Smithsonian on March 22, 2022
Digitally colored map of New York based on census data

Mapping Historical New York

A digital atlas that visualizes Manhattan’s and Brooklyn’s transformations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
by Mae Ngai, Gergely Baics, Wright Kennedy, Rebecca Kobrin, Laura Kurgan, Leah Meisterlin, Dan Miller via Columbia University on October 27, 2021
Collage of FSA and OWI photographs
partner

Photogrammar

A web-based visualization platform for exploring the 170,000 photos taken by U.S. government agencies during the Great Depression.
by Lauren Tilton, Taylor Arnold via American Panorama on February 10, 2021
Collage of maps representative of the project
partner

Southern Journey: The Migrations of the American South 1790-2020

The maps embrace everyone —free and enslaved, from the first national census of the late 18th century to the sophisticated surveys of the early 21st century.
by Ed Ayers, Justin Madron, Nathaniel Ayers via American Panorama on January 1, 2021
Horses standing next to a car.

What Extremely Muscular Horses Teach Us About Climate Change

You can’t understand the history of American energy use without them. A new visual history puts them in context.
by Robinson Meyer via The Atlantic on December 8, 2020
Bill of Mortality from the plague, and New York Times list of Covid deaths.

When 194,000 Deaths Doesn’t Sound Like So Many

From plague times to the coronavirus, the history of our flawed ability to process mass casualty events.
by Rebecca Onion, Jacqueline Wernimont via Slate on September 13, 2020

Explore 175 Years of Words in 'Scientific American'

Search a 4,000-word database to see how language in the magazine evolved over time.
by Moritz Stefaner via Scientific American on August 18, 2020

How Rigid is the Middle Class in the US, Really?

Exploring the economic mobility of 11,172 middle class families over a 50-year period.
by Amber Thomas, Alice Feng via The Pudding on August 1, 2020
Drawing of earth encircled with celestial rings

The Protestant Astrology of Early American Almanacs

The wildly popular books helped people understand farming and health through the movement of the planets, in a way compatible with Protestantism.
by T. J. Tomlin, Livia Gershon via JSTOR Daily on March 15, 2020
Political cartoon of people of all races sharing Thanksgiving dinner.

Teaching the Reconstruction Era Through Political Cartoons

A public historian recommends tactics for explaining an oft-left out period.
by Nick Sacco via Muster on January 14, 2020
Covers of annual editions of Bob Damron's Address Book from the 1970s.

Mapping the Gay Guides

Visualizing Queer Space and American Life
by Eric Gonzaba, Amanda Regen via Mapping The Gay Guides on December 14, 2019

A People Map of the US

What does it look like when city names are replaced by their most Wikipedia’ed resident?
by Matthew Daniels, Russell Goldenberg via The Pudding on May 29, 2019
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