Stefanie Posavec On Her Handmade Charts Of Famous Novels
Infographic of the Day
Posavec would rather process information with pencil and paper than PHP, and the results are undeniably powerful.
Now that there are entire programming languages dedicated to automating data visualization, you couldn’t be faulted for assuming that Stefanie Posavec creates her dizzingly intricate infographics with algorithmic help. But you’d be wrong. In this gorgeous video profile by Protein, Posavec reveals that she analyzes and creates her data-viz projects by hand.
Yes, it’s hard to believe: How could a sane human being create this cascading diagram of On The Road with mere pencil and paper? Posavec, who admits that her inability to code sets her apart from most of her colleagues, simply says that she "spend[s] lots of time reading and re-reading text, counting words or counting numbers… until I have all the data in a notebook." In fact, she says that even if she could lean on a computer for help, she wouldn’t want to: "By reading and re-reading these texts, I’m able to understand more about a specific subject than I would if I wrote a computer program to analyze that text for me." Take that, Stanford Literary Lab!
Posavec’s no Luddite, though--she recently co-created an iPhone app called MyFry, which graphically represents phrases and themes in Stephen Fry’s autobiography. Maybe pen-and-paper data visualization has a future after all.
