Sharing data in 2014? Easy: just upload a picture to Twitter, or an interactive dashboard to Tableau Public, and you’re done. Anyone in the world with a browser can see your data.
In 1914? All you need is a horse, a cart, and a really big printing press.
The photo above, from Brinton’s book, shows a Municipal Parade in New York in 1913. The floats a position 1 and 3 are carrying charts about city spending. This was how they shared government data 100 yrs ago.
Are our governments doing any better today?
On the positive side, yes: we have https://www.data.gov/ and similar programmes run by governments across the world.
On the negative side? Well, congress still loves to print out some truly awful charts: http://www.floorcharts.com/
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