Hi, it's Giles here.
The genesis of this week's newsletter was the result of scrolling through X on a Sunday night and coming across a post referencing Histography.io's incredible visualisation of historical events. I had never heard of it, but it really captured my attention—probably for way too long. It uses Wikipedia as its data source, and each historical event sits as a single dot.
The brilliance here isn’t the data per se, but rather the spatial construct: time becomes literal distance. This helps to visualise scale. From my random clicking, I realised that the first underground railway line in London started operating in 1863, the same year the American Civil War was still raging. It feels true because I can see it, not just because I read it. Histography turns the textbook timeline into a playground.
Data visualisation at its best is a bit of a magic trick. The numbers become stories, dots become people, and the abstract can feel concrete. The Pudding’s interactive essay, “How Hollywood Sees Asian Americans,” zooms us into the present. Scraping 2,300 films, it plots every role played by an Asian American actor on a grid that measures screen time and character agency. Hover over a dot, and up pops Michelle Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All at Once or Ke Huy Quan in The Goonies. Data that might have languished in a report is impossible to ignore because it moves as we move across the screen.
There is a simple idea that links Histography and The Pudding, which is that sight unlocks insight. Whether visualising the timeline of empires or plotting Asian American actors, the designers made the invisible visible. Both of these examples are leveraging the power of digital media, but that is not the reason they are so powerful and engaging. The common denominator is that they are designing from a question. There is a powerful sense of curiosity at the heart of them.
In 1869, French civil engineer Charles Joseph Minard condensed the entire story of Napoleon’s disastrous 1812 march on Moscow into a single poster. A coloured ribbon shows troop size shrinking as it moves east; a black ribbon shows the frozen retreat, and this is overlaid with a thermometer of Siberian temperatures. Edward Tufte, the ‘Galileo of graphics’ (Bloomberg), still calls it “the most eloquent, graphic illustration of war ever made.”
Minard was semi-retired when he read an 1859 history book that quoted the size of Napoleon’s 1812 army but never showed how and where it was lost. He was appalled by the ‘intellectual negligence’ in the official tables and reports, and this drove him to answer what he saw as the critical question: ‘Where, exactly, did Napoleon’s half a million soldiers disappear between Lithuania and their return from Moscow, and what forces hastened that disappearance?’
Ultimately, what links this 19th-century map with the interactive digital storytelling of today is the intent. They transform our passive reading of facts into an active process of discovery, proving that sometimes the best way to answer a question is simply to draw it.
Giles Jepson,
CGO at BeenThereDoneThat
Further reading:
https://pudding.cool/2025/05/aapi-casting/
