The first assignment in my infoVis class was to make a visual introduction to ourselves. I drew a self-portrait in profile, then added my categorized interests in the style of a 19th-century phrenology illustration (compare with actual period illustrations here and here).
Phrenology is interesting stuff. Though phrenologists had nearly everything wrong, modern neuroimaging has demonstrated that one important part of their core idea was right: many psychological functions really are highly localized in the brain. And they made a lot of really cool infographics. Actually, maybe this is pseudoscience in general; palmistry and astrology also make silly data into some neat-looking infovis. This same exercise would be fun with made-up star charts and palm diagrams.
