Antologia di cultura grafica is the series Lazy Dog dedicates to the history of visual communication. Edited by Alessandro Colizzi and Silvia Sfligiotti, joined from time to time by one or more guest editors, the series offers a sequence of volumes organised around a theme or an era. Each volume brings together a wide-ranging collection of texts and images of historical importance, often previously unpublished or long out of print, each accompanied by a commentary and introduced by an essay in which the editors survey the places, figures and events considered central to the subjects addressed.
How many forms can data take? How do numbers turn into images, and images into knowledge? The fourth volume in the series explores the long history of data visualisation, from the earliest graphic representations of physical qualities in the late Middle Ages through to the digital tools of the third millennium.
The anthology gathers texts by the authors who helped define the visual language of statistics and information: from the fourteenth-century philosophers who prefigured the idea of Cartesian space, to Otto Neurath, theorist of Isotype, to Jacques Bertin, whose Sémiologie graphique laid the theoretical foundations of modern data visualisation, and on to Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, who reconsider its principles from a feminist perspective.
A common thread runs through centuries and disciplines, from historical cartography to experimental physiology, from propaganda to contemporary debates on the political value of visualisation. It shows how the visual representation of data is never a neutral choice, but always implies a position — scientific, political or aesthetic — in relation to the world it describes.
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Edited by
Silvia Sfligiotti and Luciano Perondi
Book design
Bunker
Texts by
American Statistical Association, Matteo Azzi, Jacques Bertin, Giorgio Caviglia, Émile Cheysson, Jacobus de Sancto Martino (attributed to Nicole Oresme), W.E.B. Du Bois, Tommaso Elli, Leonhard Euler, Antoni Jaźwiński, Giorgia Lupi, Lev Manovich, Étienne-Jules Marey, Michele Mauri, Charles-Joseph Minard, Franco Moretti, Otto Neurath, William Playfair, Joseph Priestley, Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Ola Rosling, John Snow, Mary Eleanor Spear, Giorgio Uboldi, Vsevolod Vasil’evskij, Emma Willard
And contributions by
Louis Agassiz, Abū al-Rayḥān, Adriano Attus, Dominikus Baur, Hugh W. Calkins, Gioacchino da Fiore, DensityDesign Lab, Sergei M. Eisenstein, Futurefarmers, Daniel Goddemeyer, Gyeongseong Ilbo, Olivia Johnson, Josh On, Jan Lenica, Duane F. Marble, Randall Munroe, Michael Najjar, Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth P. Peabody, Robert Plot, Júlia Rabetti Giannella, Werner Kolewinck, Matthew H.P.R. Sankey, Jaime Serra Pabou, Moritz Stefaner, Friedrich Straß, Roger F. Tomlinson, Awo Tsegah, Domenico Vandelli, Gwendolyn Warren
13.5 × 21.5 cm
276 pages
Paperback with flaps
Italian
ISBN 978-88-98030-55-2
Available from September 2026
