Customer Reviews

Playfair's Commercial and Political Atlas and Statistical Breviary

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This facsimile edition of Playfair's two books reprints the original books from two centuries ago.

In the first, the Commerical and Political Atlas he is (perhaps) the first to apply charts to illustrate financial statistics. He shows charts of the trade balance between Enaland and various other countries. Especially interesting is the chart of trade with North America as it covers the period of the american revolution. This is combined with commentary to explain why the chart looks as it does. Another chart shows the British National Debt from 1688 to 1800.

The Statistical Breviary is a set of statistics on several countries, mostly around Europe. This describes the size, population, navy (Portugal in 1800 had 18 ships from 40 to 80 guns.) and other statistics.

This book is copied from the books in the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the University of Pennsylvania.

This is one of a few key books for anyone seriously interested in visualization or information graphics. In addition to containing Playfair's two most historically significant works, the introduction by the editors adds very significantly to the value of the book. The "introduction" is actually an extremely well researched 32-page essay, which general readers should find entertaining for the surprising biographical information on Playfair's life (for example, his relationships with James Watt and the king of France). Readers with a scholarly interest should also be pleased with the introduction's discussion of the few historical precedents and inspirations for Playfair's creation or inventive use of line graphs, bar charts, pie charts, circle charts, Venn diagrams (before John Venn was born) and what today would be called glyphs. Although it would be nice if the introduction contained more pictures of historically related graphics by Playfair and others, there is a list of references included that readers can track down for related information and graphics, including many articles freely downloadable from Spence's personal website.

Following the introduction are high quality colour reproductions of Playfair's Atlas and Breviary, which are over 200 years old and otherwise only available in rare book collections. Readers can thus own a piece of history with this volume, and reading Playfair's original text yields some insight into his thinking.

Playfair's Commercial and Political Atlas and Statistical Breviary, much beloved by Tufte and others, is a monument in the history of communication with imagery. His relatively simple charts, such as one showing the balance of trade between Norway and England as a time-series dual line plot, look totally modern and familiar to us, but were an incredible novelty in his day. Nor was he limited to linear charts: he worked with bar charts, innovative pie-charts, and combinations of several chart formats.

The text in this complete facsimile edition is, in addition, wonderful to read. If you enjoy reading intellectual strivers of the Enlightenment, as I do, you will enjoy this book thoroughly. He deals with sophisticated issues of data presentation and analysis in language so plain, you wonder how we got into our present mess with statistics being always associated with incomprehensible jargon. He also gets in some zingers against Adam Smith, with whom he had some differences.

Today we are inundated with statistical graphs, so it's hard to accept that in his day, Playfair's innovations were regarded with suspicion! The very informative introduction to this edition describes the intellectual prejudices of his day against graphical display of information. So much for a picture being worth a thousand words - in those days, they preferred the words! Pictures were thought to be unreliable, and subject to all sorts of hidden error, while words could be parsed to the bone to cut away the fatty tissue of falsity. It was Playfair's genius to turn this on its head successfully, although he personally never made much of a go of it financially.

Playfair's Commercial and Political Atlas and Statistical Breviary is a fascinating insight to the late 18th century. The book is a reproduction (the originals are almost priceless), created by `photocopying' an original page by page complete with defects and marks. This brings the modern reader very close to the original at an affordable price.

Why does this matter? Playfair invented the art of displaying statistical data! Pie Charts, histograms (bar graphs) line graphs and the wise use of colour to highlight trends and variance had their publishing début in this book. Anyone interested in the history of statistics (or in our case the history of scheduling, timelines and Gantt Charts - Google `A Brief History of Scheduling') finds this book at the very origins of their researches.

The modern introduction provides a fascinating insight to the original author and his book. So overall it is a `must have' keepsake for anyone interested in the history of the graphical representation of data. The benefactors and team that made this possible are to be commended on a job well done.

Lynda Bourne & Patrick Weaver