It’s tempting to consider information visualization a relatively new field that rose in response to the demands of the Internet generation.
But, argues Manual Lima in The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge, “as with any domain of knowledge, visualizing is built on a prolonged succession of efforts and events.”
Via Kenneth Mikkelsen
In the Renaissance, the philosophers Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes, used tree diagrams to describe dense classification arrangements. Trees really became popular as a method of communicating and changing minds with Charles Darwin.