Conceptualization through Visualization

How the Ancient Egyptians built a real-time data model that changed the world.

You might think of data visualization as a niche in the ever burgeoning tech sector, a result of the great strides made in data processing and scripting languages in the past few decades. It’s true that the barriers to entry have never been lower for aspiring data scientists and designers. Massive quantities of data can now be processed in the blink of an eye and published for the world to consume without ever leaving your desk. I myself am a benefactor of the digital age in which I’ve grown up. But long before D3.js, Matlab, or even Microsoft Excel (gulp), humans were creating visual representations of information that were both intuitive and insightful.

Their tools were primitive, and their methods tedious, often involving handwritten datasets meticulously plotted on paper or chiseled in slate. This old-world craftsmanship has been diminished by our migration from physical modeling in favor of APIs and graphing libraries. Access to large datasets at the click of a mouse certainly has its advantages, but though our tools are far more powerful, we should not underestimate the abilities of our ancestors to build striking information visuals. Data visualization expert Edward Tufte often draws upon centuries old graphics to illustrate particular concepts. He praises a graphic depicting Napoleon’s march to Moscow created by Charles Joseph Minard in 1869 as being one of the greatest information visuals ever. Work such as Minard’s deserves the acclaim, but we can go back much, much further and still find incredible examples of data visualization.

As impressive as Minard’s work is as a visual representation of information, I hesitate to agree with Tufte about where it ranks all time. I am inclined to look to our ancient ancestors, to the first devices used to track and display time in a precise and granular method: the sundial.

Nearly every early civilization utilized some variation of it, as far back as the Egyptians in 1,000 BC. It works by mapping the sun’s position in the sky to its coordinating time of day via the shadow cast by a centered point, or nodus. A user observes the location of the shadow in relation to a series of intervals etched into the dial. Most of this is common knowledge, but let’s step back for a moment and examine the significance of the sundial from a data viz perspective.

A constant stream of live data (sunlight) is beamed to the sundial, which then maps a visual representation of that data (the shadow). At any moment, provided there is sunlight, a user can view a real-time update of the data in an easily digestible manner via the dial’s interface. The sun is a natural API, serving live data to the sundial to manipulate and display accordingly. Yes, real-time data was being parsed and displayed by the Ancient Egyptians 3,000 years ago. Just let that marinate for a moment…

no API call limit on this badboy

Time is mankind’s most compelling metric. Our lives are so utterly dependent upon time that it is nearly impossible to imagine a world without it. Now consider that the sundial, in all its primitive, open-source glory, is the spark responsible for the standardization of time we take for granted today. While the use of the sun, moon, and other astronomical entities were used to track time over seasons or years, the sundial is the first device to record intervals of time smaller than a day. It didn’t just display time. It conceptualized time in a way that hadn’t previously existed, and made it accessible and comprehensible for its users. Say what you will about today’s infographics designed with the resources and technology at our disposal, but for my money, the sundial is mankind’s greatest achievement in the field of data visualization.