Thread by @PeterHarling, Lockdown gave me time and good reason to put together this best-of: [...]

Lockdown gave me time and good reason to put together this best-of: a mix of slick essays, rich tomes, friendly manuals, and clever comics, which all helped me build @SynapsNetwork by tackling to the same, difficult question: How do we order our world to best convey its meaning?

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Enlightening essays
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This sweeping history of information starts off with the unexpectedly modern language of African drums, made to save from corruption messages relayed across vast expanses. Gleck does as good a job explaining the mathematical breakthroughs that structure today's world of bits.

This one reads like a novel, although it dwells on the origins of classification schemes, such as the alphabet or the Melvil Dewey system, which remained at the heart of how we organized knowledge until digitization turned everything on its head.

Burdick takes in hot pursuit a piece of information more elusive than would seem: the time it is. As we currently define it, it is a recent invention, endlessly manufactured by a network of dedicated laboratories that must literally, once a month, synchronize their watches.

This early essay by the founder of TED Talks is bold for its time in both layout and thesis: Information smothers more than serves us. It is a welcome reminder that most of the problems we encounter today predate a democratized internet, which only catalyzed them.

Given the time we spend online, it befits us to understand where the internet came from, how it works, and where it’s headed. This short book untangles the nexus of military interests and libertarian values that shaped the web—an ill-sorted marriage unresolved to this day.

In a globalized world rich in independent media, think tanks, and academic fora, is the marketplace of ideas as creative as it should? It is less fertile than its resources would suggest, because the conservative players who dominate it have no interest in rethinking our systems.

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Historical deep-dives
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This study scrutinizes the great 16th century turning point, hinging on books whose text and illustrations—notably technical graphs—could reach more people, faster, and free of the corrosion caused by manual copying, thus sparking an explosion of collective knowledge production.

The 19th century is another moment when information undergoes dramatic change, via communication networks, mass education, national historiographies, the study of the Other, expanding international norms, and proper data collection—all covered masterfully in this opus.

This scientific book is a historical artefact in its own right. The math is lost on the lay reader, but an accessible foreword clues us on concepts central to understanding communication: bits, channel, noise, and entropy, which is another way of saying that information is order.

The importance of this book lies in the exponential curve of documents organizations produce as a raison d’etre, a form of power, and a substitute to productivity. Creeping bureaucratization generates so much information it rarely turns into knowledge—rather drowning it out.

This dense volume tackles the delicate question posed by scientific nomenclatures, as applied to diseases, medical acts, and causes of death. Even in technical fields, naming systems turn out to be surprisingly ad hoc, reflecting and reinforcing an era’s inherent biases.

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Information made visual
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This enormous collection—1000 pages in two volumes the size of a large codex—lets the reader travel through time. The emergence of marketing in the late 19th century sparked a big bang of its own: A frenetic, ongoing exploration of instant, impactful, visual expression.

This masterpiece is entirely devoted to illustrating how graphic design can enhance the transmission of information, through layouts, typography, textures, and highlights, meshed with the artwork itself. Even the book’s table of content stands as an astounding proof of concept.

This classic hasn’t aged a day: It reminds us how often information is laid out in ways that confuse more than convey meaning. In clear writing, Tufte explains the rules that preside over clever, effective, and truthful charts and tables—notably the ever-pertinent ink-data ratio.

This is a manual combined with a style guide. It unpacks every aspect of visual communication on the basis of what is proven to work best for the human eye. The sheer amount of guidance makes both for a difficult read and a perfect reference book to go back to when in doubt.

A tough yet necessary read for the non-statistician... At a time when anyone can produce colorful graphs in a few clicks, this book tells us how much thought, work, and hard-earned technique must go into plotting data, to reveal rather than distort the trends it conceals.

A disciple of Tufte, Few modernizes his legacy and applies his own, powerful innovations to a very contemporary problem: grasping at a glance information that is truly important. If dashboards have become a gimmick and a fad, Few restores their original purpose: efficacy.

This book on architecture is actually about information, because buildings bear meaning. Alexander sees architecture as a language that is beautiful when it says something we can understand: Materials, shapes, perspectives serve a purpose, and perfection lies in serving us well.

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The power of comics
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Combining short text and sequential drawings has developed into one of the most powerful vehicles for storytelling—on a par with filmmaking, which shares many of its techniques. This brilliant manual reviews the extraordinary variety of visual props that fire up our imagination.

This history of mathematics is a gripping tour de force in storytelling. It is fittingly self-referential, with the epic of great intellectual debates nested within Russell’s personal quest for truth, nested within the authors’ own journey, as they strove to pull off this feat.

People come and go in this story, giving life to its central, inanimate character: the bench they pause on. The absence of any other structure—notably dialogues—puts in relief the emotional progression felt by the reader, which is at the heart of any compelling storytelling.

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Writing to be read
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Writing well isn’t an obscure talent. Zinsser doesn’t just make it look easy: With unfailing modesty, he explains the simple methods that help us write vividly about the most ordinary topics. He also makes it practical, by discussing different genres and stages in the process.

This book is so brilliantly written that it could be intimidating, if it weren't for two liberating aspects. Pinker has a pragmatic, visual approach to explaining the structure of a sentence, and he bows to the living nature of language, always deferring to usage over schoolmarm.

Experienced writers will gain enormously from this guide. Hart discusses a range of projects he was involved in, to introduce problems that must be resolved for a story to work. He brings in that second pair of eyes, piercing yet sympathetic, you would want on your own writing.

Now your turn Twitter! I'd be grateful for recommendations on enjoyable books to read in these (seemingly dry) areas: visual design, computer science, legibility and readability, communication techniques, library science, and the history of knowledge

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