Graphs of the Week, Month or Century
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Title: Moral Statistics of France: Suicides
Author: Andre-Michel Guerry
Location: Paris, France
Year: 1864

Andre-Michel Guerry (1802-1866) was one of the inventors of modern social science and the empirical study of social statistics -- rates of crimes, suicides, out-of-wedlock births, etc.

This choropleth map (1864) shows the distribution of suicides in the departments of France over a 25 year period; darker tints portray more suicides. A series of small graphs are used to show other aspects of the distribution -- by day of the week, month of the year, and small symbols on the map show minimum and maximum among men, young persons, etc.

It was one of 17 plates in Guerry’s greatest work, Statistique Morale de l'Angleterre Comparée avec
la Statistique Morale de la France.

See my article, A.-M. Guerry's Moral Statistics of France: Challenges for Multivariable Spatial Analysis, Statistical Science, 2007, 22, 368-399.

©2007. Creative Commons License Except where otherwise noted, the Gallery of Data Visualization by Michael Friendly is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License. Please cite any uses of this work as shown below.
Citation: Friendly, Michael (2001), Gallery of Data Visualization, Electronic document, http://www.datavis.ca/gallery/,