At the time, this was a complete revelation. The finding: the households that suffered the most from cholera were all using the same well for drinking water. The concentration and length of these bars show a specific collection of city blocks in an attempt to discover why the trend of deaths is higher than elsewhere. It uses small bar graphs on city blocks to mark the number of cholera deaths at each household in a London neighborhood. Visualization by: John Snow Learn more: Wikipedia The John Snow Cholera map (not the Game of Thrones’ Jon Snow) is essentially an early dot map visualization. A lot of it is reasonable criticism, but this remains a hugely influential and successful chart, one which excels in telling a story with rich detail at each data point and encourages curiosity.

Because of its fame, there is a lot of critical commentary about this chart ( this post from is a good example). It is effective, detailed, and paints a staggering picture of the journey’s devastation. Below the central visualization is also a simple temperature line graph illustrating the rapidly dropping winter cold. The width of the line represents the total number of soldiers and the color represents the direction (yellow for towards Moscow, black for the return trip). The map details the out-and-back journey of Napoleon’s troops. This chart tells the story of that campaign and has become one of the most famous visualizations of all time. It was a disaster: having started with around 470,000 soldiers, he returned with just 10,000. Visualization by: Charles Joseph Minard Learn more: Wikipedia In 1812, Napoleon marched to Moscow in order to conquer the city. Also, be sure to check out our detailed guide to data visualization or check out some of our favorite examples. We’ll look at some notable historical examples first and then fast forward and discuss some more contemporary visualizations. In this article, we’re going to highlight some of the most influential, most interesting, and most revealing visualizations out there. Great and beautiful data visualization requires graphic design and storytelling skills in addition to great analysis skills. There are many wide-ranging applications from business dashboards to public health visualizations to pop culture trend breakdowns. While data visualization often conjures thoughts of business intelligence with button-down analysts, it’s usually a lot more creative and colorful than you might think.

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Ways to visualize data