Infographics (a clipped compound of "information" and "graphics") are graphic visual representations of information, data, or knowledge intended to present information quickly and clearly. They can improve cognition by using graphics to enhance the human visual system's ability to see patterns and trends. Similar pursuits are information visualization, data visualization, statistical graphics, information design, or information architecture. Infographics have evolved in recent years to be for mass communication, and thus are designed with fewer assumptions about the readers' knowledge base than other types of visualizations. Isotypes are an early example of infographics conveying information quickly and easily to the masses.
Overview Infographics have been around for many years and recently the increase of the number of easy-to-use, free tools have made the creation of infographics available to a large segment of the population. Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter have also allowed for individual infographics to be spread among many people around the world. Infographics are widely used in the age of short attention span. In newspapers, infographics are commonly used to show the weather, as well as maps, site plans, and graphs for summaries of data. Some books are almost entirely made up of information graphics, such as David Macaulay's The Way Things Work. The Snapshots in USA Today are also an example of simple infographics used to convey news and current events. Modern maps, especially route maps for transit systems, use infographic techniques to integrate a variety of information, such as the conceptual layout of the transit network, transfer points, and local landmarks. Public transportation maps, such as those for the Washington Metro and the London Underground map, are well-known infographics. Public places such as transit terminals usually have some sort of integrated "signage system" with standardized icons and stylized maps. In his 1983 book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, statistician Edward Tufte defines "graphical displays" in the following passage:
Graphical displays should show the data induce the viewer to think about the substance rather than about methodology, graphic design, the technology of graphic production, or something else avoid distorting what the data has to say present many numbers in a small space make large data sets coherent encourage the eye to compare different pieces of data reveal the data at several levels of detail, from a broad overview to the fine structure serve a reasonably clear purpose: description, exploration, tabulation, or decoration be closely integrated with the statistical and verbal descriptions of a data set. Graphics reveal data. Indeed graphics can be more precise and revealing than conventional statistical computations.
History
Early history In 1626, Christoph Scheiner published the Rosa Ursina sive Sol, a book that revealed his research about the rotation of the sun. Infographics appeared in the form of illustrations demonstrating the Sun's rotation patterns. In 1786, William Playfair, an engineer and political economist, published the first data graphs in his book The Commercial and Political Atlas. To represent the economy of 18th century England, Playfair used statistical graphs, bar charts, line graphs, area charts, and histograms. In his work, Statistical Breviary, he is credited with introducing the first pie chart. Around 1820, modern geography was established by Carl Ritter. His maps included shared frames, agreed map legends, scales, repeatability, and fidelity. Such a map can be considered a "supersign" which combines sign systems—as defined by Charles Sanders Peirce—consisting of symbols, icons, indexes as representations. Other examples can be seen in the works of geographers Ritter and Alexander von Humboldt.
In 1857, English nurse Florence Nightingale used information graphics to persuade Queen Victoria to improve conditions in military hospitals. The principal one she used was the Coxcomb chart, a combination of stacked bar and pie charts, depicting the number and causes of deaths during each month of the Crimean War.
1869 saw the release of an influential information graphic on the subject of Napoleon's disastrous march on Moscow. The graphic's creator, Charles Joseph Minard, captured four different changing variables that contributed to Napoleon's downfall in a single two-dimensional image: the army's direction as they traveled, the location the troops passed through, the size of the army as troops died from hunger and wounds, and the freezing temperatures they experienced. James Joseph Sylvester introduced the term "graph" in 1878 in the scientific magazine Nature and published a set of diagrams showing the relationship between chemical bonds and mathematical properties. These were also some of the first mathematical graphs.
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