Exhibition: Pretty As A Picture Beautiful Science: Picturing Data, Inspiring Insight


Pretty as a Picture
Beautiful Science: Picturing Data, 
Inspiring Insight
The British Library, The Folio Society 
Gallery, London
20 February–26 May 2014: admission free.

They say a picture paints a thousand 
words but is it also true that a picture 
paints a thousand numbers? The British 
Library’s latest exhibition Beautiful Science: 
Picturing Data, Inspiring Insight considers 
the role of diagrams and data display in 
the development of scientific theory over 
the ages. It has impressive works from the 
archive, mixed with modern artwork and 
video sound bites from Professor Dame 
Sally Davies all underlying the importance 
of data illustration in our understanding 
of the world. It is divided into three areas: 
climate, evolution, and public health and 
opens with a computer animation showing 
the flow of the ocean currents crunched 
from thousands of NASA satellite readings. 

The result is quite mesmerising and 
wouldn’t be out of place in the Turner 
prize but perhaps that says more about the 
Turner prize. This can be contrasted with 
the intricately drawn logbooks kept by the 
Victorian skippers charting trade winds and 
geography from their own observations. The 
evolution section has Darwin’s handwritten 
The Origin of Species lying open at the only 
illustration in the book, the tree of life. The 
modesty of this sketch compared with the 
enormity of the breakthrough it represented, 
is striking. There is an interactive tree of life 
to accompany this, where your children 
(or you) can check on the survival status 

of the three-toed sloth. Circos is a fun 
artwork commissioned especially for 
the exhibition which takes the 46 human 
chromosomes and transforms them into 
technicolour circles and compares them 
with six other species. It is intriguing to note 
how little genetic material resides in the Y 
chromosome and how relatively much it has 
in common with the opossum.  

Data collection and illustration were just 
waiting for the advent of public health in 
the 19th century. John Snow’s cholera map 
of Soho and Florence Nightingale’s ‘rose’ 
diagrams are both on display here as is 
William Farr’s rather less accurate but 
nevertheless eye-catching mapping of the 

miasma. This compact exhibition mixes the 
playful and profound. There are undoubted 
developments in accuracy and many 
important breakthroughs in evidence but 
‘progress’ is more of a slippery beast. These 
exhibits show that science strives after the 
‘fact’ but that art concerns itself with ‘truth’ 
and as we enter the era of ‘big data’ we 
would be wise to know the difference. 

charlotte alexander,
GP Locum at Monteagle Surgery, Yateley and at 
CrouchOak Family Practice in Addlestone, Surrey.

e-mail: charlottealexander@doctors.org.uk 

DOI: 10.3399/bjgp14X680245

exhibition
Out of Hours

British Journal of General Practice, June 2014  301

One Zoom tree © James rosindell, imperial college London 2012 http://www.onezoom.org. this interactive 
allows viewers to explore the evolutionary relationships between tens of thousands of mammals, birds, reptiles 
and amphibians (tetrapods). it  uses a branch of mathematics known as fractal geometry to create an attractive 
visualisation that can be explored by zooming in, to get ever more detail. the data includes audio from the 
British Library’s wildlife sound collections. © the British Library Board. 

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