Scott Klein on the Forgotten History of Visualization in News
Tapestry 2016 brought data and storytelling luminaries of all flavors to Estes Park, Colorado. We are excited to share their stories with you here on the Tapestry blog.
We kicked off the conference with keynote speaker Scott Klein of ProPublica. Scott outlined the rich history of data visualizations in the news.
"Being a history nerd, I started wondering how far our history goes, and was very surprised, indeed, about how far I could go," Scott said. "It turns out data journalism goes so far back [that] it actually predates newspapers."
Check out Scott's presentation below.
Catherine Madden, who also spoke at Tapestry, took some great sketch notes throughout the conference. Her notes on Scott's presentation are seen in the above image.
And many of the attendees chimed in on Twitter with reactions to Scott's presentation. Here's a snippet of that conversation.
Great stuff. @kleinmatic showing us how data was part of journalism from the very beginning, before there were even newspapers #tapestryconf
— Robert Kosara (@eagereyes) March 9, 2016
Avant guard visualizations in 1849 #Tapestryconf pic.twitter.com/oVBABawPEC
— Jenny Richards (@jnnyrchrds) March 9, 2016
The thought of a dual line chart ever being regarded as avant guard is simply fascinating! #tapestryconf
— Sean Miller (@kcmillersean) March 9, 2016
Cool! The same technology that let news media print comics let them print much better data graphics. @kleinmatic #tapestryconf
— Collin Matthew Belt (@CollinMBelt) March 9, 2016
How did they get data graphics out so quickly in 1896? By not being exactly accurate. @kleinmatic #tapestryconf pic.twitter.com/srM5lIiVlA
— Erik Jacobsen (@threestory) March 9, 2016
Hilarious early data visualization that @kleinmatic showed from 1900 Chicago Tribune! #tapestryconf pic.twitter.com/CE9eAhi52s
— Brittany Fong (@BFongData) March 9, 2016
Check out the rest of the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #TapestryConf.We may think that #dataviz is the *new*, hip thing, but we owe to those who started them hundreds of years ago #tapestryconf @kleinmatic
— Trina Arnett (@trinalytics) March 9, 2016