Graphic Discovery

"In an illustrated story of invention and inventor that mixes science and politics, intrigue and scandal, revolution and shopping, Howard Wainer validates Thoreau's observation that circumstantial evidence can be quite convincing, as when you find a trout in the milk." "The story really begins with the eighteenth-century origins of the art, logic, and methods of data display, which emerged, full-grown, in William Playfair's landmark 1786 trade atlas of England and Wales. The remarkable Scot singlehandedly popularized the atheoretical plotting of data to reveal suggestive patterns - an achievement that foretold the graphic explosion of the nineteenth century, with atlases published across the observational sciences as the language of science moved from words to pictures."--Jacket.

First sentence: "Getting information from a table is like extracting sunbeams from a cucumber" (Farquhar and Farquhar).

Year

2004

Language

English

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Editions

4

Pages

208

ISBN

9780691134055

Data source: Wikidata