
A brief history of data science
Richard Farnworth takes us through a short, definitely incomplete, but very entertaining history of data viz. His description of William Playfair is particularly good:
[Playfair] … ran a currency counterfeiting operation to collapse the French currency and took part in the storming of the Bastille. A bit of a rogue and a scoundrel he also ended up in debtors’ prison after several failed businesses.
Richard Farnworth, A Short History of Data Visualisation