History of Mendeleev periodic table of elements as a data visualization I am looking for a comprehensive and authoritative reference (journal article or book) dealing with the history of Mendeleev periodic table of elements as a data visualization. I am especially interested how  the graphical representation of the table of elements changed over time.
As of now I found Wikipedia article History of the periodic table to be comprehensive (but it is not that authoritative). 
I want to use it as (see-also)-type citation (I don't want to use any particular claims), so even a popular science article should be fine.
 A: My original best guesses came up short (at least for the articles I had quick access to). Friendly's The Golden Age of Statistical Graphics mentions a derivative of the periodic table is Moseley's discovery of the concept of an atomic number - but doesn't mention the table itself. I quickly checked the work of Michael Friendly and Howard Wainer to see if they had any general pieces on the work - but I found none (quickly).
I don't have quick access to Tufte's book(s) - but he is pretty comprehensive in historical review. It is possible he mentions the periodic table in brief (but I think is unlikely to have a review of the table over time like you envision).
Some perusing on Google Scholar though brought up a Journal of Chemical Education that has a few articles of interest. See:


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*Diffusion cartograms for the display of periodic table data (Winter, 2011)

*From Periodic Properties to a Periodic Table Arrangement (Besalú, 2013)

*Periodic Table of the Elements in the Perspective of Artificial Neural Networks (Lemes and Dal Pino, 2011)
From there I got lucky and found Periodicity, visualization, and design by Francis T. Marchese - which appears to fit your bill perfectly for a historical narrative (although doesn't cite the other more recent articles I mention).
