person:alexander von humboldt

Alexander von Humboldt: the graphic novel
▻https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00958-5

https://media.nature.com/lw1024/magazine-assets/d41586-019-00958-5/d41586-019-00958-5_16565890.jpg

Four years ago, the historian Andrea Wulf rescued Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) from relative international obscurity with her delightful biography, The Invention of Nature.

To celebrate the 250th anniversary of Humboldt’s birth this year, Wulf has teamed up with artist Lillian Melcher to create The Adventures of #Alexander_von_Humboldt, a graphic work of non-fiction depicting Humboldt’s five-year exploration of Latin America as a young man.

It was a time when scientists had become obsessed with measuring and documenting all aspects of their environment, from human features to the elevation of hills. But no one took investigation of the environment further than Humboldt — and no one thought as seriously about how the measurements could be integrated into a holistic understanding of our globe.

#roman_graphique

The #Atlas to Alexander von Humboldt’s “Kosmos,” by Traugott Bromme. Stuttgart: Krais & Hoffmann, 1851
▻http://www.johngrimwade.com/blog/2016/10/06/atlas-heaven

https://i2.wp.com/www.johngrimwade.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Lakes.jpg

#mer #lacs #cartographie #histoire #beau

Digging Up the Nineteenth-Century Roots of Thematic Map Techniques | The New York Public Library

▻https://www.nypl.org/blog/2016/12/14/digging-nineteenth-century-roots-thematic-map-techniques

The mission of my Short-Term Fellowship was to research the development of thematic map technique in the West: the way that proportional circle, flow line, isopleth, choropleth, dasymetric, dot density, and cartogram techniques were invented and developed in Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century.
Atlas Geographique Alexander von Humboldt, Atlas Géographique et Physique du Royaume de la Nouvelle-Espagne, 1811. Paris: F. Schoell. ; p. 19

When I told friends and family about my project, there would be a pause, followed by either a confused search for a response ("Oh. Umm?") or a swift segue back to normal topics ("Huh. So, where are you staying?"). Hovering in the air between us was an incredulous elephant: this is how she spent the gift of four weeks in the Map Room, where masterpieces of cartography from across the centuries, elsewhere protected beyond the credentialed gates of private research libraries, are here available for public consultation? Instead of communing with maps from Joan Blaeu’s seventeenth century masterpiece, the Atlas mayor, she chose to leaf through yellowed, crumbling international statistical congress proceedings and the dusty annual reports of departments of public works, in search of black-and-white foldout maps and line diagrams?

Yes, and it was glorious.

#cartographie #cartographie_thématique #visualisation

Population Cosmos :
▻http://infowetrust.com/humboldt

https://i2.wp.com/infowetrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/1811-Alexander-von-Humboldt-crop.jpg

Stacked bars allow comparison across nations of the total number of early data visualization pioneers, in the style of a chart from Alexander von Humboldt’s 1811 Atlas Geographique Et Physique Du Royaume De La Nouvelle-Espagne (Geographic and Physical Atlas of the Kingdom of New Spain):
Rumsey Collection

#Alexander_von_Humboldt was a Prussian polymath famous for a scientific expedition to Latin America (1799-1804) which laid the foundation for modern biogeography and long term geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring. He was the first to explore the New World extensively with a modern scientific perspective. He came away from adventures through Venezuela, Cuba, the Andes, Mexico, and the United States, with a fortune of data collected using the most modern scientific instruments available. His quantitative methodology – which featured observation, precision, and the aesthetic ideals of Romanticism – became known as Humboldtian science.

In addition to the stacked bar chart featured here, Humboldt also constructed the first isothermal chart:

#visualisation #cartoexperiment #précurseurs #cartographes #cartographie #Humboldt