A colossal volume by cartographer and theorist Jacques Bertin. The first 15 of its over 400 pages delivered the most bang. Read the introduction to understand the book’s general theory and spirit. Then use the Contents to navigate to what interests you most.

Like the earlier Enlightenment informers, Bertin makes strong connections between geographic maps and abstract statistical charts. I really like how he emphasizes the importance of producing informative singular images—temporal units of meaningful visual perception—while also negotiating how no one image can reveal everything.

Bertin’s uses the word energy to describe the total salience of how data appears to us. It set the stage for many future authors to riff on their own systems of what Bertin called retinal variables: design dimensions that each have the ability to change how the value of a data mark hits the sensors of the eye’s retina. They include position, size, darkness, hue, texture, shape, and orientation. Info We Trust references Bertin’s work several times, and quotes him directly once: “The entire problem is one of augmenting this natural intelligence.”

I knew the reputation of this work. It's a very impressive reference source. I've found it to be a necessary volume on my visualizations book shelf.

I do wish I could find some companoion sources that address the digital formats we live and work with.

The book is a very good guide for the basis on how to construct diagrams and other graphics. The language used makes the book a little boring to read, but is absolutely necessary to understand the concepts behind the design of a graphic, infography, diagram, etc.

This is a remarkable book. I've read Tafte books 2 years ago and after that was unable to find anything interesting or new in the Visualization field. This book was the first one that is comparable with Tufte work and even exceeds them. It provides very clear and beautiful theory of data visualization that you can apply on practice immediately. Yes, it is quite old, but it is absolutely relevant and has "fresh" feeling.

It's a classic. Every Information Designer must have one copy of this book

In the preface to the 1983 translation of the Semiology I emphasized the book''s importance as a guide to the future, for it seemed clear that we were on the cusp of an explosion in the use of graphical methods for both the exploration and communication of complex data. This prediction came true. In the intervening 27 years a huge amount of work has been accomplished to help us use graphical methods profitably. This work has been in hardware that can produce graphical displays quickly and inexpensively; software that can translate data files into graphical representations with the click of a mouse; and statistical and perceptual research that helps us know how to use these tools well.

Let me briefly comment only on the latter two aspects. I choose to refrain from any commentary on hardware because my remarks would almost surely be out of date before they were printed. So first, graphical software: thirty years ago I was enthusiastic and optimistic about the future of graphical use, for, I thought, software will be built that has sensible default options, so that when the software is set on maximal stupidity (ours not its), a reasonable graph would result. The software would force you to wring its metaphorical neck if you wanted to produce some horrible pseudo 3-D multicolored pie chart. Alas, I couldn''t have been more wrong. Instead of making wise, evidence-based, choices, default options seem to have been selected by the same folks who deny the holocaust, global warming and evolution. I could not have imagined back then that the revolution in data gathering, analysis and display that was taking place in the last decades of the 20th century would have resulted in the complexity of the modern world being conveyed in bullet-points augmented by PowerPoint and Excel graphics.

The irony of this sorry result is that since the original publication of the Semiology there have been many wonderful books on graphics ' each building on the work of Jacques Bertin paired with John Tukey''s practical epistemology. Bill Cleveland's work uses a combination of statistical savvy and experimental evidence to support and expand upon Bertin''s foundation. Edward Tufte''s brilliant series of books that self-exemplify the advice he gives on how to make evidence beautiful. Leland Wilkinson''s Grammar provides a codification that is invaluable for both how to think about the structure of graphics and how to automate their construction. And my own work, that has mixed together statistics, graphics and history to provide illustrations of what we can accomplish with this marvelous medium. Indeed, the growing popularity and importance of graphics even made it viable for a publisher to reprint William Playfair''s 18th century Atlas, the work that began it all.

But despite this accumulating graphic wisdom, practice continues to lag. I cannot help but believe that had Bertin''s masterwork not fallen out of print some of today''s graphical ignorance would have been ameliorated. This view was surely shared by the publishing arm of L'École Practique des Hautes Études, who republished a 4th edition of the French version in 2005. At about the same time the University of Wisconsin Press was seriously considering the republication of the English translation. Anne McKenna. one of their editors, explained,

"'University of Wisconsin Press had been considering bringing Semiology of Graphics back into print several years ago and had begun work to bring that about, checking into renewing rights from the French publisher, looking into arranging for a translation of new material from a newer French edition, getting cost estimates, etc. However, several retirements and staff changes sent the project to the back burner for a while.'"

This delay was unfortunate because the market for a republication seemed more than ready. A few months ago, on Amazon, I noticed that one could get a new copy for $550 and the price for a used one began at $399. These remarkable prices merely reflect supply and demand, for those of us who have our own copies are loath to part with them. Happily ESRI decided to do it. They approached the University of Wisconsin Press, and, as Anne McKenna related,

"'As we re-opened the file to get the ball rolling again, we were contacted by ESRI expressing their interest in licensing the book for a new English-language edition. When we realized that ESRI had a strong publishing program in cartography and cartographic design, the UW Press's director felt that ESRI would be a better home for Bertin's book, where it would receive much more active promotion. 'We well know that the Semiology of Graphics is an important book with an eager audience, and it seemed to us that ESRI would do a fine job of bringing the new edition to that audience.'"

This publishing generosity is as welcome as it is rare. The reappearance of the Semiology did not come too soon, for our need for improving the quality of displays increases apace with the increase in the number of graphs being produced. I am certain that the quality of displays that are prepared to communicate quantitative phenomena will improve in direct proportion to the extent to which this book is read and internalized by those who generate graphics, and, more importantly, by those who develop the software that are used to produce them.

The body of the text in this edition is identical to the previous edition: what is new is the postface, which is an update of work done over the decades since the Semiology was previously published and Bertin gives a chronology explaining what is new. But what is new is beside the point, for the original work was far ahead of its time. I remember many years ago as Bertin, Bill Berg (the principal translator) and I were discussing the translation Berg said, of one of Bertin''s expressions "Ça ne se dit pas, en Anglais" (We don't say that in English); Bertin replied: "Ne vous inquiétez pas: si ça ne se dit pas, ça se dira" (Don't worry; if you don't say it now, eventually you will).

Many of us are saying it now, and with the republication of the Semiology, many more soon will be.

References

Cleveland, W. S. (1994). The elements of graphing data. Summit, NJ: Hobart Press.

Cleveland, W. S. (1994). Visualizing data. Summit, NJ: Hobart Press.

Playfair, W. (1801). The Commercial and Political Atlas, & The Statistical Breviary. Edited and introduced by Howard Wainer and Ian Spence. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Tufte, E. R. (1983/2000). The visual display of quantitative information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.

Tufte, E. R. (1990). Envisioning information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.

Tufte, E. R. (1996). Visual explanations. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press .

Tufte, E. R. (2006). Beautiful evidence. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press .

Tukey, J. W. (1977). Exploratory data analysis. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Wainer, H. (1997). Visual Revelations: Graphical Tales of Fate and Deception from Napoleon Bonaparte to Ross Perot. New York: Copernicus Books, (reprinted in 2000, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates).

Wainer, H. (2005). Graphic Discovery: A Trout in the Milk and Other Visual Adventures. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Wainer, H. (2009). Picturing the Uncertain World: How to Understand, Communicate and Control Uncertainty through Graphical Display. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Wilkinson, L. (2005). The Grammar of Graphics (2nd edition). New York: Springer-Verlag.

I don't mean to dock this book any of its venerable 5 stars because I think I bought this book in error. After reading that this was Tufte's inspiration, I was expecting a tour-de-force compendium on graphics, drawing, and clarity of visual information.

Instead of clarity I opened a tangle of texts and illegible inky charts, line drawings, maps, and hard-to-decipher diagrams that look like they were reproduced on a 1985 Xerox machine. There are some gems in there regarding color, shape, and line weight, but only a few practical map examples of France and Europe. Everything is crowded, thick with ink, and you won't get far without reading the text.

Perhaps I'm taking this book out of context and its historical significance, but anyone who has ever had to draw any graphic information will know most of these lessons subconsciously. Unlike Tufte's Envisioning Information, a lot of the drawings are hard to understand quickly and intuit the theory behind them.

Should a book on graphics require pages of verbal explanations? I think Tufte would say no, and I think he would have made an excellent editor to Semiology of Graphics.

Tufte's books have captured a lot of Bertin's message regarding the visual aspect of graphics (which is, in my experience, now all that is meant by "graphics"), and in a more clear, succinct, and possibly even comprehensive manner. However, _Semiology_ is about much more than what can be seen - it deals extensively with how to get an interesting story from information, which (if I remember correctly) Tufte does not address. I've only seen one other author deal with the process of sifting/sorting/refactoring to find interesting correspondences - Charles L. Owen (in Structured Planning, ) - though it is probably covered in many statistics curricula and is necessarily a part of graduate training in most fields, as Bertin predicts in this book's foreward.

I would like to say that Bertin presents this important perspective/process in a compelling graphic way, but in fact the book is as dense and inconsistently structured as any of Tufte's great counterexamples. The figures are labelled in unpredictable orders on the page, some never mentioned in the text, and because of a mediocre printing job, many exhibit the very errors Bertin seeks to show how to avoid. Worse, these sort of problems are paralleled in the explication (especially with regard to showing a quantity vs. a quantity spread over an area, or Q vs. QS/S in Bertin's formalism), making it a significant challenge to figure out what is central to the argument and what is in the background.

Still, the insight is in there, and the weaknesses are not too great to stop a determined or required reader. The book is full to bursting with myriad practical tips and tricks regarding not just how, when, and why to cram more information onto the page, but also how to decide what information the reader needs. More importantly, it shows how to "discover the groupings contained in the information" (pg 164), that is, to arrive at an understanding of the data without forcing them into a predetermined system*. This is highly significant, and if Bertin was among the first to capture it (even if somewhat obscurely) then this book deserves all of its renown and is sure to grow in importance.

* this is a problematic thing to claim, but in this respect it's my summary which is inaccurate, not Bertin's concepts.

Desconheço um livro melhor que trate sobre semiologia gráfica. Muito indicado para quem estuda e pesquisa na cartografia.

Jacques Bertin's book provides an exhaustive and perceptive analysis of the semiology of diagrams and maps. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in this topic.

He podido observar que se trata de una re-edición magnífica de un libro que ya es clásico en la disciplina. Esta edición hace honor a la importancia que este texto, por sí solo ha ido adquiriendo a lo largo de los años.

Ben concepito. Bello da tenere in mano e da sfogliare, ma attenzione, è molto ‘tecnico.’