Last week I visited the British Library’s Beautiful Science exhibition – in a bit of last minute panic before it ended on Bank Holiday Monday.
The show explored how numbers can be turned into pictures to represent data and communicate scientific ideas.
As the exhibition blurb eloquently explained, maps, charts and diagrams allow us to:
“Identify trends, correlations and associations. These data graphics provide a point of intersection between science and graphic design, elegantly portraying complex information. They are tools of discovery, as well as communication, whose beauty lies both in the insight they inspire and their aesthetic qualities.”
Basic visual elements, like bright colours and attractive shapes, made the data on display more accessible and digestible to non-scientists.
The ‘Great Chain of Being’ by Robert Fludd (1617) is an early visual representation of a hierarchically ordered universe.
‘Perpetual Ocean’ by NASA visualises the flow of ocean surface currents over a specific period of time, helping scientists and the public to understand the impact on weather around the globe.
Most relevant for me was the public health section.
“Data is at the heart of the endeavor to build a healthy society. Tracking infection rates and the geographical distribution of a disease can help us monitor the progress of an epidemic or identify local environmental factors contributing to illness and death.
Epidemics and public health emergencies, whether from influenza or HIV/AIDS, are now a global concern, and visually representing this data is becoming ever more important. While many techniques developed in the 19th century remain dominant, computer models and time-based visualisations are enabling us to work with data in ever more sophisticated ways.”
Maps were used to great effect, giving visual representations of numbers like fast food outlets per 100,000 population in England. I also enjoyed the interactive ‘Epidemic Planet’, where I could enter variables like place of origin, travel restrictions and early vaccination campaigns to create an Outbreak-style animation of how an epidemic would spread throughout the world.
An advocate for a data-driven approach to public health, epidemiologist and statistician William Farr used innovative graphic methods to communicate data. In his cholera maps, Farr plotted temperature and cholera deaths in the mid-1800s, noting that “the diagram represent the facts in a striking manner to the eye”. Although his hypothesis that cholera was spread by ‘bad air’ was incorrect, Farr left an important legacy with the first national system for collecting statistics.
The exhibition also included Florence Nightingale’s ‘Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency and Hospital Administration of the British Army’.
“In her seminal ‘rose diagrams’ Florence Nightingale demonstrated that far more soldiers died from preventable epidemic diseases than from wounds inflicted on the battlefield or other causes during the Crimean War (1853-56). The drop in deaths from preventable diseases in early 1855 followed her implementing sanitary measures in army hospitals. Although most famous for her nursing work, Nightingale was a keen statistician and close friend of William Farr, who encouraged her statistical work. She understood the power of visual communication, developing this diagram with the specific aim of driving important military hospital reforms through government.”
A video at the start of the exhibition suggested that data visualisations create a porthole or looking glass into science, allowing the layperson to penetrate complex ideas. Science and numbers are not my strong point and I still found a lot of the exhibits difficult to interpret, but I enjoyed the show and gained a better appreciation of how graphics can communicate complicated statistics in a far more accessible way.