An Interactive Chart of Biography

Abstract

Joseph Priestley's Chart of Biography is a masterpiece of hand-drawn data visualization. He arranged the lifespans of around 2,000 individuals on a timeline, and the chart obtained great value for teaching purposes. We present a generic, interactive variant of the chart adopting Priestley's basic design principles. Our proposed visualization allows for dynamically defining person groups to be visually compared on different zoom levels. We designed the visualization in cooperation with musicologists having multifaceted research interests on a biographical database of musicians. On the one hand, we enable deriving new relationships between musicians in order to extend the underlying database, and on the other hand, our visualization supports analyzing time-dependent changes of musical institutions. Various usage scenarios outline the benefit of the Interactive Chart of Biography for research in musicology.