Album de Statistique Graphique

This particular set of half pies on a map of France from 1882 feels familiar to some the charts in Bertin’s Sémiologie Graphique 80 years later:

Legends are used to explain many visualizations — presumably some of these visualization techniques are quite new in 1880’s. These pies also work nicely as nodes in a graph (something to consider in the ongoing pie chart debates):

With computer-based visualization, it’s really easy to create data-driven geometry — if that geometry is overlapping, then it is also easy to use transparency to help differentiate between the overlapping colors. In the Album, this particular radar plot has a filled red object and a filled yellow object: where they overlap it’s alternating horizontal stripes of red and yellow – much more easy to decode if you simply look at the book more closely.

Source: richardbrath.wordpress.com