The Permanent Collection · Always on view
The Permanent Collection
Seventy-three thousand years of seeing numbers
Seven rooms trace the long human habit of turning quantity into picture — from notches on a baboon fibula to graphics drawn by machines. Walk them in order; the argument builds.
Scroll to walk · 7 rooms · 26 works
Room I · Prehistory–1800s
The Origins of Data Visualization
In this room, the oldest marks we know of. Long before charts had names, people cut tallies into bone and traced grids into ochre — the first attempts to hold a quantity still long enough to look at it.
The Commercial and Political Atlas
William Playfair, 1786
Archival reproduction
Here's a story that will change how you look at every chart you've ever seen.
William Playfair, Public Domain
Also in this room — awaiting installation
- The Blombos OchreUnknown Homo sapiens artist, ~73,000 BCE
- The Lebombo BoneUnknown prehistoric mathematician, ~43,000 BCE
- The Ishango BoneUnknown prehistoric mathematician, ~20,000 BCE
- The Turin Papyrus MapUnknown Egyptian scribe, ~1160 BCE
- The Imago MundiUnknown Babylonian scribe, ~700 BCE
- The First Statistical GraphMichael Florent van Langren, 1644
Room II · 1800s–1900s
The Pioneers of Modern Graphics
In this room, the nineteenth century learns to argue with pictures. A cholera map closes a pump; a rose diagram reforms an army; a single flowing line carries four hundred thousand men into Russia and brings ten thousand home.
John Snow's Cholera Map
John Snow, 1854
Archival reproduction
In the late summer of 1854, a devastating cholera outbreak tore through London's Soho district, killing hundreds in a matter of days.
John Snow, 1854 — Public Domain
Florence Nightingale's Rose Diagram
Florence Nightingale, 1858
Archival reproduction
Florence Nightingale is famous as the founder of modern nursing, but she was also a pioneering statistician who understood something crucial: data doesn't change minds unless people can actually see it.
Florence Nightingale, 1858 — Public Domain
Minard's Map of Napoleon's Russian Campaign
Charles Joseph Minard, 1869
Archival reproduction
In 1869, a retired French civil engineer named Charles Joseph Minard — then 80 years old — sat down and created what many consider the greatest statistical graphic ever drawn.
Charles Joseph Minard, 1869 — Public Domain
Galton's Weather Map
Francis Galton, 1875
Archival reproduction
Before Francis Galton came along, there was no such thing as a weather map in a newspaper.
Francis Galton / The Times, 1875 — Public Domain
W.E.B. Du Bois's Data Portraits
W.E.B. Du Bois and students at Atlanta University, 1900
Archival reproduction
In 1900, sociologist W.E.B.
W.E.B. Du Bois / Library of Congress — Public Domain
Room III · 1900s–1960s
The Science of Visualization
In this room, visualization becomes a discipline. Designers and statisticians stop decorating numbers and start asking, with rigour, what the eye can actually read.
Harry Beck's Tube Map
Harry Beck, 1933
Archival reproduction
In 1933, a 29-year-old engineering draftsman named Harry Beck quietly revolutionized how cities see themselves — by throwing geography out the window.
Harry Beck / Transport for London — Public Domain
Isotype Picture Language
Otto Neurath and Gerd Arntz, 1936
Archival reproduction
Before there were emoji, before there were app icons, before there were international airport pictograms — there was Isotype.
Otto Neurath and Gerd Arntz — Isotype Institute
Bertin's Semiology of Graphics
Jacques Bertin, 1967
Study after the original
If there is one book that gave data visualization its theoretical backbone, it is Jacques Bertin's "Sémiologie Graphique," published in Paris in 1967.
Jacques Bertin — Sémiologie Graphique, 1967
Tukey's Exploratory Data Analysis
John Tukey, 1977
Study after the original
John Tukey was one of those rare scientists who could reshape an entire field with a single idea — and he did it more than once.
John Tukey — Exploratory Data Analysis, 1977
Room IV · 1970s–2000s
The Digital Turn
In this room, the chart meets the computer. Interaction arrives — rotation, brushing, drill-down — and with it the first formal grammars for describing any graphic at all.
PRIM-9
Mary Anne Fishkeller, Jerome H. Friedman, and John W. Tukey, 1973
Study after the original
In 1973, a team of three researchers at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) — Mary Anne Fishkeller, Jerome Friedman, and the legendary John Tukey — created PRIM-9, the first-ever interactive computer graphics system designed specifically for exploring multivariate statistical data.
Fishkeller, Friedman, and Tukey / SLAC, 1973
Challenger O-Ring Analysis
Edward Tufte (analysis); Morton Thiokol engineers (original data), 1986
Study after the original
On January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after launch, killing all seven crew members.
Edward Tufte, Visual Explanations, 1997
Shneiderman's Treemap and Visual Information-Seeking Mantra
Ben Shneiderman, 1996
Study after the original
Ben Shneiderman, a computer scientist at the University of Maryland, made two contributions to data visualization that are so widely used today that most people encounter them without knowing where they came from.
Ben Shneiderman / University of Maryland, 1990–1996
The Grammar of Graphics
Leland Wilkinson, 1999
Study after the original
In 1999, statistician Leland Wilkinson published 'The Grammar of Graphics,' a book that did for data visualization what Noam Chomsky's generative grammar did for linguistics — it decomposed the seemingly infinite variety of statistical charts into a finite set of composable, formal components.
Leland Wilkinson — The Grammar of Graphics, 1999
Also in this room — awaiting installation
- Cleveland & McGill Perceptual RankingsWilliam S. Cleveland and Robert McGill, 1984
Room V · 2000s–Present
The Visualization Explosion
In this room, visualization goes public. Browsers, libraries, and newsrooms put charts in front of millions, and a TED stage makes a scatterplot famous.
From Prefuse to D3.js
Jeff Heer and Mike Bostock, 2005–2011
Study after the original
The most important visualization library on the web has a family tree that starts in a Stanford research lab.
Mike Bostock / D3.js — BSD License
Hans Rosling's TED Talk and Gapminder
Hans Rosling, 2006
Study after the original
In February 2006, a 57-year-old Swedish professor of global health named Hans Rosling walked onto the TED stage and delivered what would become one of the most-watched TED talks of all time — 'The best stats you've ever seen.' Armed with animated bubble charts that plotted every country in the world across axes of income and life expectancy, Rosling narrated 200 years of global development in four breathless minutes, his pointer chasing China and India as they leapfrogged across the screen.
Gapminder Foundation / Hans Rosling
The New York Times Election Needle
Mike Bostock and The New York Times Graphics Team, 2012
Study after the original
On the night of November 6, 2012, millions of Americans refreshed the same webpage over and over, watching a thin needle swing back and forth on The New York Times' election forecast page.
The New York Times
Observable: Notebook-Based Visualization
Mike Bostock and Jeff Heer, 2017
Study after the original
After D3.js conquered the web visualization world, its creator Mike Bostock turned his attention to a harder problem: making data visualization not just powerful, but accessible and collaborative.
Observable, Inc.
The Johns Hopkins COVID-19 Dashboard
Lauren Gardner and Johns Hopkins CSSE, 2020
Study after the original
On January 22, 2020 — weeks before most of the world had heard of COVID-19 — a civil engineering professor named Lauren Gardner and her graduate student Ensheng Dong at Johns Hopkins University's Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) launched a simple web dashboard tracking a mysterious new respiratory virus emerging from Wuhan, China.
Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering
Room VI · 1990s–2010s
The Fragment & The Whole
In this room, artists take the tools back. Networks of influence, genomes, the wind itself — drawn not to summarise but to be contemplated.
Wind Map
Fernanda Viégas & Martin Wattenberg, 2012
Study after the original
In March 2012, visualization researchers Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg — both then leading Google's 'Big Picture' data visualization group — quietly launched hint.fm/wind, a website that displayed real-time wind patterns across the contiguous United States as thousands of delicate, flowing white particle traces on a dark background.
Fernanda Viégas & Martin Wattenberg / hint.fm
512 Paths to the White House
Mike Bostock & Shan Carter / NYT, 2012
Study after the original
On November 2, 2012 — four days before the presidential election between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney — The New York Times published '512 Paths to the White House,' an interactive decision tree created by graphics editors Mike Bostock and Shan Carter.
Mike Bostock & Shan Carter / The New York Times
Also in this room — awaiting installation
- Mark Lombardi's Narrative StructuresMark Lombardi, 1994–2000
- The Human Genome VisualizationMartin Krzywinski / HGP teams, 2001
- Ben Fry's Genomic CartographyBen Fry, 2004
Room VII · 2015–Beyond
The Future of Seeing Data
In this final room, the lights go down. Hand-drawn postcards, generative art, and machine-made graphics ask what seeing data will mean next. The collection ends where it began: with a person, making a mark.
Dear Data
Giorgia Lupi & Stefanie Posavec, 2015
Study after the original
In 2015, two information designers who had never met in person — Giorgia Lupi in New York and Stefanie Posavec in London — embarked on one of the most beautifully human data projects ever conceived.
Giorgia Lupi & Stefanie Posavec — Dear Data
Data Sketches & Artistic Dataviz
Nadieh Bremer & Shirley Wu, 2016–2017
Study after the original
In 2016, two freelance data visualization designers — Nadieh Bremer in the Netherlands and Shirley Wu in San Francisco — launched Data Sketches, a monthly collaborative project that would help redefine what data visualization could look like.
Nadieh Bremer & Shirley Wu — Data Sketches
Immersive Data Environments
Various (MIT Media Lab, Kineviz, et al.), 2018
Study after the original
By 2018, a critical mass of researchers and startups were exploring a tantalizing question: what happens when you don't just look at data on a screen, but step inside it?
Kineviz / GraphXR
The Pudding's Visual Essays
The Pudding (Matt Daniels, Russell Goldenberg, et al.), 2017–present
Study after the original
In 2017, journalist and developer Matt Daniels relaunched a small digital publication called The Pudding with a radical editorial premise: every story would be told primarily through interactive data visualization, not traditional text articles with charts sprinkled in.
The Pudding
AI-Generated Visualization
Various (OpenAI, Anthropic, open-source community), 2023–present
Study after the original
In 2023, the data visualization world crossed a threshold that had seemed decades away: people began generating charts, dashboards, and interactive visualizations by simply describing what they wanted in plain English.
Various — AI-generated visualization ecosystem
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