“In terms of presenting large amounts of information quickly and digestibly, an infographic is hard to beat. A good one can give a reader a sense of scale, proportion, and even narrative much more quickly than several paragraphs of explanation and explication. It’s the difference between recording your genealogy as a series of “begats” or as a family tree. And today’s pictographs are so sophisticated that they can contain essentially an entire cultural history in a JPEG. Take Places & Spaces: Mapping Science, a multidisciplinary physical and online art project, running since 2005, that seeks to create a complete picture of “human activity and scientific progress on a global scale.” Curated by a group of librarians, information scientists, and geographers around the world, each exhibit features a handful of maps—an older word for infographic—along a theme. Previous years have exhibited maps designed to index information for policy makers, or for cartographers, or economic decision makers. This year, the theme is the digital library.” [By Xarissa Holdaway]