Making of the New York and Erie Railroad Organizational Diagram

Since I almost skipped over it.. the rest of this stuff is also very good ( https://www.c82.net/work/). There's an adaptation of Euclid here: https://www.c82.net/work/?id=372

There's more color and I don't see here any obsession with stuff like recursion, but the preoccupation with math/data, plus what seems like technical training as a draftsman actually reminds me a lot of Escher.

Wow gorgeous vis and the restorer put in a ton of work to make it a bit of their own especially with the color variants. Kudos to them! Probably going to buy this.

As a whole the piece is amazing, but when zooming in on the details, the digital version kinda feels lifeless with too-straight lines and identical clipart. I think what gets lost in this kind of digital recreation are some of the stuff I love most from old maps: the subtle variations introduced from printing, the hand-carved lines in the hatching not being perfectly straight, the moments of bespoke difference that no standardized font or clipart captures.

The restored version is not quite the same, and that's fine especially since those details are hard to see at a glance. It's beautiful overall. I wonder though if we can use some of our newer image generation techniques to re-introduce the wonderful subtleties of the print version.

This illustration is a classic in the style of Tufte's Envisioning Information although I don't remember seeing it in his books. But given the current climate of DOGE cuts and Musk's demand for email reports of what each gov employee did last week it occurs that a public online org chart of the entire non-classified Federal Government with weekly entries made by all employees would be a huge win and would justify the level of spending.