Patricia’s Diagrams
Ahead of our trip to London tomorrow I have been reviewing some images and I came across these photographs I took last Thursday. They show the work of Patricia, one of the History Detectives. The commissioners in this project were first investigated some years back and Patricia was one of the original group. She has been exploring the life of Michael Bland and has recorded the information on a series of diagrams.
I think it’s one of the most useful ways of presenting research information as it allows for adaptions, alterations and crossings out. These diagrams can be used as the basis for a piece of text, an article or book but as you can imagine I am most fond of the diagram just as it is, visual and open to how it is read, processed and understood.
It was last year that I watched Marcus de Sautoy’s The Beauty of Diagrams programmes, each week a different diagram was explored including Florence Nightingale’s Rose diagram and visualising DNA. The programme, presented by a mathematician clearly demonstrated the ability of the diagram to cross professional disciplines and make the information easier to understand. There are short clips of the programmes available here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00w5675/clips
Another interesting resource well worth a look is the book Information is Beautiful by David McCandless. It covers a whole host of subjects and ways of using visual terms to describe information. http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/
It’s perhaps an obvious point but I’m taken by how both of these people are considering beauty in relation to disseminating or recording. I want to create a map of the research to date to help me plan the artwork, there is lots of information so it may take some time.
