[Commlist] The Infographic - new book concerning histories of news, communications and ideas

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/infographic

The Infographic is an exploration of infographics and data visualization 
as a cultural phenomenon, from eighteenth-century print culture to 
today's data journalism.

Infographics and data visualization are ubiquitous in our everyday media 
diet, particularly in news—in print newspapers, on television news, and 
online. It has been argued that infographics are changing what it means 
to be literate in the twenty-first century—and even that they harmonize 
uniquely with human cognition. In this first serious exploration of the 
subject, Murray Dick traces the cultural evolution of the infographic, 
examining its use in news—and resistance to its use—from 
eighteenth-century print culture to today's data journalism. He 
identifies six historical phases of infographics in popular culture: the 
proto-infographic, the classical, the improving, the commercial, the 
ideological, and the professional.

Dick describes the emergence of infographic forms within a wider history 
of journalism, culture, and communications, focusing his analysis on the 
UK. He considers their use in the partisan British journalism of late 
eighteenth and early nineteenth-century print media; their later 
deployment as a vehicle for reform and improvement; their mass-market 
debut in the twentieth century as a means of explanation (and sometimes 
propaganda); and their use for both ideological and professional 
purposes in the post–World War II marketized newspaper culture. Finally, 
he proposes best practices for news infographics and defends 
infographics and data visualization against a range of criticism. Dick 
offers not only a history of how the public has experienced and 
understood the infographic, but also an account of what data 
visualization can tell us about the past.


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