welcome back to the american product institute.
a little over a week ago we published best-laid plans - our foray into the well-trodden genre of inspirational turn-of-the-year posting, though we firmly believe the essay to be evergreen. it’s never a bad time for a good plan.
today we break ground on a new wing of the institute: a digital art gallery.
the gallery will be a triumphant curation of mankind’s most potent representations of facts and figures. an exhibit of charts and maps and tables and graphs all worthy of exhibition. worthy of accolade. worthy of reverence.
we’re pleased now to unveil the first piece enshrined in the permanent collection of the datavisual gallery at the american product institute:
the histomap.
john b. sparks - the histomap, 1931
on the vertical axis is time - four thousand long years of it. on the horizontal axis is power - that of each nationstate relative to its contemporaries. every civilization from the west to the east painted as a colorful river coursing through history. ebbing and flowing and sometimes drying up completely. the most significant moments across the millennia nothing more than lightly-annotated canon in a sleek sans serif.
the details of those moments altogether could fill a borgesian library of history books - but this is not a library nor is it a book. it is a datavisual. a stunning sequel to a new chart of history, the groundbreaking joseph priestley work that had made such an impression on academia two centuries prior. but sparks surpasses his predecessor in both form and function, with a graphic endeavor of massive scale the succeeds equally at levels microscopic and macroscopic.
up close, any random crop of the canvas will yield a data-rich fragment worthy of framing in its own right. from afar, the history of the world is lit up in a technicolor tornado, hurdling through time, empires rising and falling in the blink of an eye. the histomap is data visualization its transcendent best.
the histomap resides digitally in the permanent collection of the datavisual gallery at the american product institute. the permanent collection expands perpetually.
prints of the histomap are available for purchase from the private collection of david ramsey. copyright by john b. sparks. published by histomap, inc. chicago, illinois. printed and distributed in the u.s.a. by rand mcnally & co.