Book Description

Essays on the History of Statistical Graphics

Charles Kostelnick, Iowa State University
Miles Kimball, Texas Tech University

Today, we are used to seeing data portrayed in a dizzying array of graphical forms. Virtually any quantified knowledge, from social and physical science to engineering and medicine, as well as any business, government, or personal activity, has been visualized in charts, graphs, thematic maps, and now interactive displays. Thirty years ago graphics guru Edward Tufte estimated that billions of data displays were generated annually, but with the emergence of digital design, that number has undoubtedly multiplied into the trillions. As many controversial examples attest – from Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, to Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph of global climate change, to the now-common red state/blue state maps we see with every national election – the visual display of data has a profound effect on the way we see the social and physical world.

But these methods of making data visible are relatively new innovations, most stemming from the 18th and 19th centuries. To a large extent, statistical graphics arose as a logical response to a growing desire to quantify everything. As scientists, doctors, merchants, and governments began to collect empirical observations of the physical and social world, they quickly grew inundated with a sea of numbers, usually arranged in tables – themselves a form of graphic communication. But as William Playfair (1759-1824) pointed out in his Commercial and Political Atlas (1786), “a man who has carefully investigated the printed table, finds, when done, that he has only a very faint and partial idea of what he has read; and that like a figure imprinted on sand, as soon totally erased and defaced.” Accordingly, innovators such as Playfair, Alexander von Humboldt, Heinrich Berghaus, John Snow, Florence Nightingale, Francis Galton, and Charles Minard began to develop graphic methods to make data and their relations more visible.

Particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century, Playfair’s successors began to visualize data about health, poverty, population, industry, and a variety of other areas of social science. At the same time, science and engineering disciplines continued to develop more sophisticated methods for showing data. In the twentieth century, data design became both increasingly specialized within new and existing disciplines—science, engineering, social science, and medicine—and at the same time data design became more democratized, with new forms that make statistical, business, government, and other data more accessible to the public. At the close of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, an explosion in digital data design has increased our access to data, including complex data sets, as well as our control over its display, especially online.

Unfortunately, as these new graphic forms of communication became common practice, their historical development was largely lost to view. Only in the past two or three decades has a growing body of scholarship sought to revive our awareness of the development of the graphic tools we use today as a matter of course. While some of this scholarship has been sophisticated, much of it necessarily has focused on simply drawing our attention to these lost innovators. Much remains to be done. Now that scholars have reclaimed the work of people such as Playfair, von Humboldt, Berghaus, Galton, and Minard, we need to expand and deepen our knowledge of these once-overlooked graphic innovators, developing a critical understanding firmly grounded in visual rhetoric, visual culture, and fully contextualized historical scholarship.

We propose therefore a collection of essays by various hands that will gather together thoughtful, well-theorized, and carefully-researched scholarship on the history of data display. Our hope is to provide an opportunity for scholars to take the next step – to look beyond the reclamation of lost figures to more profound discussions that will help us understand the impact of this new method of communication on our vision of ourselves and our world.

Scope and purpose

More specifically, we propose to address a variety of questions about how the history of data display has unfolded and how we ought to study, analyze and theorize about it:

• How have visual conventions for designing data emerged, developed, evolved, and mutated? Sow have readers come to understand and accept (or reject) these conventions?
• What cultural and social values are embedded in the visual rhetoric of data displays? How has data display influenced or reflected social or political conditions?
• What rhetorical strategies for data design have been deployed historically? How, for example, do data displays create powerful visual arguments?
• What role have major aesthetic movements like neo-classicism, romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism played in designing information? How do aesthetics, for example, influence the use of color, typography, lines, shading, and other graphical elements?
• What role have technology and production practices played in generating and disseminating data displays, in inventing new forms of display, and in how readers interact with those displays?
• How have innovative designers, seminal researchers and theorists, and iconic designs influenced the course of data design practices?

The proposed collection will answer these questions by integrating several types of scholarship:

• Ten to twelve essays by researchers responding to a CFP, as well as by the editors.
• Introductory and framing essays by the co-authors that integrate and historically contextualize the scholarly components of the book.
• A comprehensive annotated bibliography of historical scholarship that will provide a resource for scholars, teachers, and practitioners of data design.

Given this scope, we anticipate a length of around 100,000 words, including around 100 reproductions of 18th and 19th century graphics.

Timeline

• February 2011: The editors will circulate a CFP among listservs and scholarly organizations in a variety of disciplines interested in the history of graphic display, including statistics, the history of science, graphic and information design, and technical, business, and scientific communication.
• August 2011: Deadline for the CFP.
• September 2011: After peer reviewing the proposals, we will accept the most promising for development into full articles.
• September 2012: deadline for completed essays.
• March 2013: By this point the essays will be peer-reviewed, revised, and edited for delivery to the publisher.