Measure of Justice: Covering the Cerîde-I Adliye Covers (2017)

4 days ago

The research exhibition 'Speak to the Eyes: Visualizing Information from the Ottoman Era to the Republic' curated by Ömer Durmaz explores information visualization in the Late Ottoman and Early Turkish Republic periods.
A subsection titled 'Measure of Justice' involved 10 designers interpreting covers of the 1920s Cerîde-i Adliye ('Journal of Justice') journal, featuring unique data visualizations.
The covers were exhibited both as prints with designer comments and as motion graphics in a projection room.
One cover from the 56th issue (1 March 1927) displayed convict numbers in Turkish prisons as of 1 June 1926, organized by sentence length and type.
The visualization used a spider web-like grid, split into sections for different sentence types, with an unconventional method of representing numbers by decimal positions.
The design compromised standard data visualization principles for a visually homogenous distribution, making exact values readable but harder to perceive intuitively.
A common mistake was representing magnitudes with circle diameters instead of areas, misleadingly displaying the numbers.
Other Cerîde-i Adliye covers also sacrificed readability for complexity, a trend worth exploring in historical data visualization contexts.
Despite methodological flaws, these covers represent exciting early efforts in data visualization from 1920s Istanbul.

Hasty Briefsbeta