The Cabinet in 2025
Your favourite articles, my favourites from others + plans for 2026.
The first year of Cabinet of Infographic Curiosities (actually only a third of a year) exceeded all my expectations. I received a lot of support from everywhere, and it also brought me many new professional friendships. More than 440 subscribers (1 paid!), more than 14000 views, an average email open rate of 48 percent. CIC was featured in Guardian, Nathan Yau’s FlowingData, Kaiser Fung’s Junk Chart, Giuseppe Sollazzo’s Quantum of Sollazzo, Ana Neves’ KMOL and Cartographie Numérique too. So I’m more than satisfied.
This year, from the late-August launch there were a total of 24 posts on Cabinet of Infographic Curiosities, including a methodological article, two monthly newsletters, and interviews with RJ Andrews and Michael Friendly. From the historical and methodological point of view we identified the presumably first, albeit botched handbook on dataviz, the first photoviz, the first spherical-pie chart cartogram, and also the first equal square tile map.
The map below shows the geographical distribution of regular posts. We visited, among others, Mexico, Peru, Bulgaria, Sweden, Hungary, Portugal, the Philippines, Greece, Australia and New Zealand, many places that are not usually included in the history of information graphics and data visualization. At the same time, you can see that Africa is completely empty and Asia is almost completely. I would definitely like to remedy this next year.
There are several reasons for this. One is that many African and Asian digital archives, even if they exist in some form, are simply unusable or have been discontinued. I will write more about this, as the digital divide significantly determines our historical knowledge too.
Another reason is that, as much as I would like to write more, this is all I have time for at the moment, and I already have a pile of articles waiting to be finished. But I want to mention here that the Cabinet of Infographic Curiosities is open, so if anyone would like to collaborate, they are very welcome to do so!
Now let’s take a look at the summary of the year!
The top 10 articles according to you
Even with the help of the internet, I still haven’t figured out how Substack ranks a blog’s top articles. The list below is based on views. Unfortunately, the earliest articles had much less chance of making it into the top ten. So as a year-end gift, I am making the articles in the archive free again for one month.
Other things from 2025
In late May RJ Andrews and I wrote an article about the German propaganda magazine’s information graphics and maps on RJ’s Chartography.
Data, society and politics - an introduction to critical data studies
Early in the summer the Critical Data Studies issue of the social science journal Replika was published. We edited the volume together with Eszter Katona (ELTE Faculty of Social Sciences). My article “Data, society and politics - an introduction to critical data studies” summarizes the key literature, findings, problems, possible answers, and areas of application of critical data studies, as well as counter-criticisms. All this is placed in a much broader historical narrative, from Bacon, Humboldt through Quételet, Galton, and Pearson to Horkheimer, Adorno, Foucault, Beniger, Porter, and to contemporaries like Scott, Rosenberg, Crawford, boyd, D’Ignazio, Klein, Mejías etc.
Beautiful Hungarian Book Award
My book Adatvizualizáció: bevezetés az adatok grafikus ábrázolásának elméletébe és módszerébe (Data Visualization: Introduction to the Theory and Method of Graphic Presentation of Data) won the “Beautiful Hungarian Book" award of the Hungarian Publishers and Booksellers Association in the technical/handbook category.
Dataviz works
This year, I did much less graphic design work than usual. I don’t know why, but somehow I enjoyed it less. I loved working with Krisztián Szabó on our scrolly about the papal election.
I also liked my designs for a Japan-related project.
Clients: National Archives of Hungary, WWF, Equilibrium Institute, Márton Kállai: Matuzsálemek book,
Lectures/workshops on data visualization: ANETILabs HUN-REN, poltextLAB, Thomson/Reuters, Yellow Design Fest, MoME, WorldCom Youth, Political Capital Summer University, Goethe Institut, CHARM-EU, E.on, District XII.
Data Vandals in Budapest!
At the end of summer, my friends Jason Forrest (btw, congrats on your appointment!) and Jen Ray (Data Vandals) held a workshop at Moholy-Nagy University of Arts and Design in Budapest. Those were amazing days! Check out the video about the workshop!
Keynote at Computation+Journalism Symposium in Miami
This year December, I had the honour of being invited by Alberto Cairo to be a keynote speaker at the Computation+Journalism Symposium 25 at University of Miami. The theme of the conference was Data Journalism under Authoritarianism. Alberto and his colleagues organized a fantastic conference with great and instructive speeches, roundtables and workshops. I had a wonderful time and made many new friends and professional contacts.
New book in 2026!
It has been pretty much decided that my new book will be published in 2026. The manuscript and licensing of texts are 90 percent complete. The book is a collection of texts about how Hungarian scientists, statisticians, economists, doctors, politicians, propagandists, journalists, and designers thought about the graphical representation of data from the 1850s onwards. I analyze the texts in a roughly thirty-page introductory study. The discourse analysis clearly shows what knowledge these people had, what correct or incorrect ideas they had about graphic presentation of data, what they saw as its usefulness, and when and how new ideas and theories were incorporated to the discourse. The texts are accompanied by more than 250 footnotes, nearly 50 images and an epilogue.
New essay on the three Budapest-albums of statistics
After a three-year delay, my study on the three magnificent statistical albums of Budapest edited by Hungarian statistician Lajos I. Illyefalvi is finally being published in print. The three albums are triumphs of Hungarian data visualization, and it was high time we gave them the recognition they deserve. The text will appear in the journal Tanulmányok Budapest Múltjából (Studies About Budapest’s Past). The three albums are already digitized by the David Rumsey Map Collection. See my short article about them from 2020 in Nightingale.
Plans for 2026, and plans for the future
First and foremost, I want to keep up the pace. That means one regular post every Monday, one interview every month, and one methodological article. Once again, if anyone would like to join, you are most welcome!
I would like to involve my university students in the work as well. If there are enough interested students, we will resume digitizing my Hungarian collection. This process was interrupted a few years ago. It’s impossible to find money for something like this in Hungary, so I don’t have a better idea at this moment than paying for the work with university credits. If that doesn’t work out again, I will offer it to a foreign archive that I know will do the job properly and where it will be in a worthy place that will ensure its preservation and accessibility for research.
As part of this work, I would also like to compile an ultimate, but constantly expanding, searchable, filterable, browsable, tagged and indexed bibliography on the history of information graphics and visual communication of data.
The best thing would be to raise all this to an institutional level. I don’t see how that could be done yet, but it would be good to set up a Central and Eastern European research and collection project, with all the necessary resources and technology. This requires money, space, people, which is not available here.
There are many who have left behind an extremely diverse body of work in information graphics, cartography, and data graphics. Among them are those whose scientific or other work has been intensively researched, such as Athanasius Kircher, Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, and Francis Galton. Still, it would be great if their drawings and visualizations could be seen together. This has already been done in the cases of Alexander von Humboldt, William Playfair, Florence Nightingale or Charles-Joseph Minard. In 2026, I definitely want to write a longer article about Marsigli’s graphic work, revisiting the Hungarian communist propaganda journalist and self-made geographer György Markos’ life and his entire Isotype-ish graphics and also the graphic work of Romanian statistician Leonida Colescu (I hope Razvan reads this!).
I also want to expand my scope to longer, problem-, or method-focused essays. Some are almost ready, others are still in their embryonic stages.
Information designer Shirley Wu asked on LinkedIn who are the people involved in the history of data visualization and worth following. I want to compile this list in 2026. I know Dutch, Chilean, Turkish, and Russian researchers who rarely or never post anything on social media, they don’t have website, blog, but they still belong on this list.
I’ll probably change the URL of the site from attilabatorfy.substack to something else. Cabinetofinfographiccuriosities is very long, so I am open to suggestions.
Unfortunately, I still haven’t figured out how to make my dataviz, visual communication and image theory book collection public and accessible. None of the solutions discussed so far seem suitable. I am also considering a book exchange program. I send you mine, you send yours. I wish it weren’t so terribly expensive to mail outside the EU.
What others wrote and did and I liked
Thomas Kole - A Portrait of Tenochtitlan
Rafal Piekarski - Historama of Kutno
Miguel Garcia Alvarez’s A cartographer’s tale - A world in a perspective
Systems of Logic/Logic of Systems - The Art of Agnes Denes / Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest
Razvan Zamfira - Romanian Historical Dataviz Collection
John Keegan’s Beautiful Public Data: Cold War Military Slides
The PJ Mode Collection of Persuasive Maps (via RJ Andrews)
Data Beads by Eszter Katona and Mihály Minkó
Maps for Kids by RJ Andrews in collaboration with Robert Simmon
The launch of Alberto Cairo’s Open Visualization Academy with sooo many great instructors!
Books and papers on the history of information graphics
Kim Marriott: The Golden Age of Data Visualization. How Did We Get Here? New York: CRC Press/AK Peters Visualization Series, 2024
Vladimir V. Laptev: Russian Infography. St. Petersburg: Peter the Great Polytechnic University, 2018
Giovanni Maria Martini ed.: Visualizing Sufism. Studies on Graphic Representations in Sufi Literature (13th to 16th Century). Leiden: Brill, 2023
Francesca Bray, Vera Dorofeeva-Lichtmann and Georges Métailié eds.: Graphics and Text in the Production of Technical Knowledge in China. Leiden: Brill, 2007
Yu Zhang et. al.: VisTaxa: Developing a Taxonomy of Historical Visualizations. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 31, no. 6, pp. 3850-3862, June 2025, doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2025.3567132
See you in 2026!
