The Day After and the Biblia Pauperum, some light reading

One of the most interesting infographics to make would be to show how many new data visualizations have been created over the last few months. In the run-up to the American as well the Dutch elections these last months I saw how images on the complex data that comes with these elections have appeared more often, and more frequently. Is this a good sign? Yes I believe so!

In Medieval times we had the Biblia Pauperum, a blockbook, explaining the holy book like in a cartoon. There are some really beautiful early examples of these “designed bibles” in Italy, sometimes in the form of a drapery that would hang over the edge of the pulpit, showing in clear (and big) images what was told from that same pulpit. Later on, mainly in 15th and 16th centuries we find some beautiful woodcuts in the Low-Countries, probably closer to the newspapers that now publish the infographics. In the last months I had to think of this quite often when being confronted with the schematics on electoral votes, swing states, and statistical discussions on prognosis.

While going through my bookmarks of the last week (in order to label them and get them into the right folder) I have collected a number of political and non-political links that would apply to the label Biblia Pauperum, plus some other things I found worth reading.

• Charting Election Night
• Over the Decades, How States Have Shifted
• Python vs PHP vs Ruby: Which Programming Language Should You Learn? | NerdGraph Infographics
• InfoDesignPatterns.com – The Form of Facts and Figures
• Naomi Robbins on effective graphs

• Don’t Look Back – a good blog post on writing
• The End of Blah Blah Blah – end those useless meetings full of talk « Business Model Alchemist

• Julia Child’s Boeuf Bourguignon Recipe « Knopf Doubleday – Cooking