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Indlæser... The Commercial and Political Atlas and Statistical Breviaryaf William Playfair
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Bliv medlem af LibraryThing for at finde ud af, om du vil kunne lide denne bog. Der er ingen diskussionstråde på Snak om denne bog. This is famous because of Playfair's role in inventing statistical visualization. If your main interest is in the charts themselves, then any online images or those available in other books, such as Tufte's, would suffice. I find them to be an odd mix of the professional and precise copperplate printing with amateurish hand water-coloring, almost like a drunkard let loose with a highlighter. The introduction by Wainer and Spence contains a biographical sketch and career overview which is interesting. As for Playfair's writing, be prepared to slog through a bunch of late eighteenth century British exceptionalism and his pontifications on the nature of nations and people. His most interesting digression might be on what statistics he would love to be able to get his hands on in the Statistical Breviary. I feel that an annotated edition would be of more use than the faithful reproduction Wainer and Spence decided to go with. I found the long-s's particularly annoying. ingen anmeldelser | tilføj en anmeldelse
A scientific revolution began at the end of the eighteenth century with the invention and popularization of the graphic display of data by the remarkable Scot, William Playfair. His marvellous Atlas showed how much could be learned if one plotted data atheoretically and looked for suggestive patterns. Those patterns provide evidence, albeit circumstantial, on which to build new science. Playfair's work has much to teach us, but finding a copy has been almost impossible. Until now. This full colour reproduction of two of his classic works, with new explanatory material, makes Playfair's wisdom widely available for the first time in two centuries. No library descriptions found. |
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The meat of the book is a photocopy of one of the originals; exact enough, unfortunately, to show things like places where the colors from a chart have bled on to the facing page. The charts themselves are of more interest for their innovations, rather than the actual data - unless you have a particular fascination for (say) the export trade with Spain in the eighteenth century. The accompanying text, as mentioned, can be insightful, although it’s in one of those typefaces where the internal or leading “s” looks like an “f”, leaving you with sentences like “Nothing can be more hurtful to real induftry, than to perceive the fuccefs in acquiring wealth of thofe who come from that part of the world.”
The “statistical breviary” section (originally a separate volume) is a summary of available statistical facts for the nations of Europe plus India in 1800. The tables include land area, population, military force, number of naval vessels, and so on. Some of this is pretty interesting; I never would have guessed that Naples was the fourth largest city in Europe (after London, Constantinople, and Paris) in 1800. Playfair uses pie charts here to show the relative area of countries and sizes of cities.
Historically interesting for the data and the way it’s presented. If you like this sort of stuff you might also enjoy the works of Edward Tufte. ( )