As the saying goes, a picture plus a thousand words is better than two pictures or two thousand words. Here we consider two ways that words and pictures are combined on the page: statistical graphics (also called data graphics or information visualization) and comics (also called sequential art or bande dessinée). These forms of visual representation typically have different purposes—to inform or to entertain—and show up in different contexts, ranging from government reports to the comic books that formed the basis of Hollywood blockbusters.

In our work in statistics and social science, we have used data graphics for several decades in applied research and have also contributed to theory and methods linking graphical communication to statistical modeling. When it comes to cartoons, we are merely readers and fans, not creators. In learning about their history, we were struck by parallels to the history of data visualization (see Figure 1), and we also see some convergence between these two forms of narrative, now that information visualizations have become more prominent in advertisement and communication, and comics have come to be viewed not merely as a pop culture phenomenon but as a branch of literature.

Figures 1a and 1b. In one of the most famous political cartoons in history, James Gilray’s The Plumb-Pudding in Danger from 1805, William Pitt and Napoleon Bonaparte are portrayed slicing up the world (left). Florence Nightingale sliced up units of time in her compelling, although easily misinterpreted, 1858 statistical graph depicting the causes of avoidable deaths during the Crimean War (right).

Surprisingly recent histories

Cartoons and data graphics require nothing apart from ink and paper, yet only during the past two centuries did scientists and artists go beyond the basics to develop now-routine visual techniques for displaying data and stories on the page. The slow development of these media is interesting, especially considering that, unlike with cinema, for example, the basic technologies have always been accessible. Scientists, mathematicians, and accountants in earlier eras could have been understanding patterns in their data using scatterplots–but they weren’t. Artists and authors could have been combining words and drawings to vividly convey speech and action-–but they weren’t.

Time series and scatterplots seem ordinary to us, but as visual representations of information, they are highly abstract compared to such centuries-old schematic illustrations as geographical maps or anatomical drawings. Depictions of data have existed for thousands of years, whether pressed into Babylonian clay tablets or inked onto bamboo slips during China’s Qin dynasty, more than 200 years before paper was invented. Illustrations of data and mathematical concepts evolved over the centuries to exploit each historic advance in visual media—inks, papers, brushes, pens, printing, computers—as well as building on the diagramming innovations of other scientific disciplines. Michael Friendly and Daniel Denis trace the development of general-purpose data graphics in the 1700s and 1800s to earlier uses of quantitative displays in astronomy, where the positions of stars and planets in the sky can be directly mapped onto a two-dimensional space, as well as to depictions in mathematical physics.

Figures 2a and 2b. Engravings exploded in popularity in the 15th century, but were superseded by the newer technology of etchings in the 16th to 17th centuries. Jacques Callot was a master printmaker who invented techniques so that etchings looked cleaner, more elegant, and more precise , as seen in his depiction of Envy (left) in his Deadly Sins series from 1620. The intaglio printing of astronomer and mathematician Edmund Halley’s drawing of what may be the first bivariate plot from his 1686 book Philosophical Transactions (right; the vertical axis is barometric pressure and the horizontal axis is altitude) reflects the delicate and meticulous style of contemporaneous illustrations.

The connection between time series, scatterplots, and mathematical functions can be seen in graphs in which a curve is fit to go through data (see Figure 2b). It seems to have taken centuries for people to go beyond this to plot data that did not fall exactly on or close to a smooth curve; indeed, this happened at roughly the same time that Fourier and others generalized the mathematical concept of function to represent arbitrary mappings between spaces. In the later 1800s, innovators such as Charles Minard, William Playfair, and Francis Galton (Figure 3b) demonstrated the open-ended possibilities of revealing patterns in data through novel visual conceptions; since then, data graphics have been increasingly important in the natural and physical sciences. In the past twenty years or so, information visualizations have colonized popular communication as well, from New Yorker cartoons of worried executives staring at charts of declining stock prices, to time series of global warming and the flatten-the-curve graphs during the pandemic. Data graphics have followed a steady increase in abstraction of conceit and presentation, which has paradoxically allowed them to be accessible to a wider range of purposes and audiences.

Figures 3a and 3b. In Thomas Rowlandson’s 1808 cartoon The Corsican Spider in His Web (left), the geometric pattern vividly and accessibly conveys a political point. Francis Galton’s 1886 correlational diagram of the heights of parents and children (right) has a similar visual appeal but requires the reader to put in much more effort to understand the data and statistical relationship being shown. The increasing abstraction of statistical graphics allows more information to be conveyed; the subsequent establishment of graphical conventions has allowed readers to more quickly interpret the content of scatterplots and fitted distributions.

Humorous caricatures and satiric cultural commentary in simplified visual form have been found to have existed at least as far back as the ancient Romans. In the supposed Dark Ages, lively drawings that lampooned society lined the margins of illuminated manuscripts, while the first known bar graphs, drawn by Nicole Oresme in 1486, seemed to have gone largely unnoticed. Playfair reinvented them, along with conceiving the pie chart, a few hundred years later, at around the same time the concept of the cartoon was taking shape. Scholars trace modern cartoons and comics as an outgrowth of printmaking, with political humor drawn by Thomas Rowlandson, James Gillray (see Figure 4a), and George Cruikshank inspired by the French Revolution and packed with visual analogy. According to French-American cartoon historian Maurice Horn, perhaps the first to formally study the art form, “It was the universal acceptance of prints that led to the phased transition from caricature to what would later be called ‘cartoons,’ a form no longer devoted simply to cataloging external human idiosyncrasies, but one with an enlarged field of vision encompassing the whole political, social and cultural scene—indeed, the human condition itself.” These became staples of periodicals for the general reader at the tail-end of the eighteenth century and on into the nineteenth. It took a while during the first hundred years for the medium to evolve beyond successions of static images to the more fluid visual storytelling associated with turn-of-the-20th-century newspaper comics and then the longer-form stories appearing in the comic books, manga, and bandes dessinées that flourished in the mid-1900s.

Figures 4a and 4b. James Gilray’s 1793 political cartoon The Blood of the Murdered Crying for Vengeance (left) was a bestselling print in its time, as the public developed a taste for this genre; hundreds of cartoons were created during the French Revolution. William Playfair, once a spy for the French government who helped storm the Bastille, eventually settled into more sanguine vocations. He is credited with inventing the bar chart, Oresme having been long forgotten. Many of the foundations of statistical graphs were laid with Playfair’s line graphs, pie charts, and time series plots. Above, we see his graph of England’s trade balance with Denmark and Norway (right; from 1786), its artistry and annotations echoing the style of Gilray and his contemporaries.

Many consider school principal Rodolphe Töpffer to be the originator of the comic strip, having drawn cartoon-stories told in chronological series for the amusement of his students as early as the 1820s, later to be published to much acclaim. This artform was codified into box-shaped panels by Georges Columb (see Figure 5c), better known as Christoph. Töpffer and Columb were the forefathers of bande dessinée and of comic strips in general, along with other French innovators such as Emmanuel Poiré, a.k.a. Caran D’Ache (see Figure 5b) and Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, a.k.a. Nadar, as well as the German Wilhelm Busch and the American A. B. Frost. The realism and refinement that developed with those genres matured into the albums and graphic novels of today.

Figures 5a, 5b, and 5c. The Swiss-French polymath Johann Heinrich Lambert called his surprisingly modern-looking diagrams figuren, and seems to have been the first to create lines of best fit, as seen in this graph of temperatures at varying latitudes from 1779 (left). The elegance of his rendering heralds the whimsical clean lines of the pioneers of bandes dessinée, such as French satirist and illustrator Emmanuel Poiré, better known by his pseudonym Caran D’Ache. His Le Rêve de M. Emile Zola​​ (center) was published in Le Figaro in 1889. Georges Columb, known as the children’s magazine illustrator Christophe, packed rectangles with painstaking detail, creating multiple-panel stories and establishing the visual grammar of comic strips. This image from 1893 (right) was part of a recurring series called L’Idée fixe du savant Cosinus published in Le Petit Français illustré.

As with statistical graphics, we are struck by how recently some of these developments arose: just as the capacity for scatterplots was available long before they were regularly made, so there is no reason why Tintin-style storytelling with rapid transitions and speech balloons could not have been done hundreds of years earlier. 

Heinz Pagels tells the story of “a stranger, who, recognizing Picasso, asked him why he didn’t paint people ‘the way they really are.’ Picasso asked the man what he meant by ‘the way they really are,’ and the man pulled out of his wallet a snapshot of his wife and said, ‘That’s my wife.’ Picasso responded, ‘Isn’t she rather small and flat?’” The relevance to our discussion here is that scatterplots, time series, speech balloons, and other tropes of statistical graphics and comics are so familiar that readers can see through the abstractions, as it were, in the same way that the husband on the train saw the photo not as a flat artifact but as a representation of a three-dimensional person. The story dramatizes that the difference between a cubist collage and a photorealist painting is not so much the level of abstraction as the familiarity of its conventions, and indeed it can take a generation for abstractions to enter the mainstream sufficiently that they can be built upon by new creators.

Statistical graphics came to maturity as a result of the mathematical use of Cartesian coordinates to represent dimensions other than physical space (see Figure 6b), along with probability distribution for variation that allowed real-world data to be represented by non-deterministic models. The rise of sequential comics coincided with the advent of film as a popular and artistic medium. Graphs and cartoons exist for entirely separate purposes, and so there may be no direct parallel here except a recognition that in science, policy, or entertainment, developments in different media feed off each other. The effectiveness of film opened the door to dynamic forms of visual storytelling on the page and in animation. Technologies of reproduction affect the forms of popular art, from printmaking in the 1700s to mass-circulation magazines and newspapers in the 1800s and 1900s, to movies and television today. Similarly, advances in mathematics and computing have turned statistical graphics from craft work into a set of routine tools in science and communication.

Figures 6a and 6b. Winsor McCay experimented with the form of the full-page newspaper comic strip with Little Nemo in Slumberland from 1905 until 1927 (left; this example from 1905). With exquisite draftsmanship, he frequently subverted the constraints of the strip’s panels. Within the same historic time frame, our understanding of atomic numbers was usurped in Henry Moseley’s graph of High Frequency Spectra of the Elements from 1913 (right). This visualization made clear that increases in atomic mass correspond to a physical property, correctly supposed by Moseley to be the number of electrons. Its lines foretold three then-unknown elements and that electrons hold a mysterious property, later discovered to be spin.

But even as they historically evolve at what seems like a yawning parallel distance, we may notice reflections of method and design between data-oriented graphs and cartoons (and the related illustrations that preceded their inventions) depending on the era and trends in artistry, as may be observed in the comparisons in our appendix. This points not only to contemporaneous conventions, but to the similar constraints required to deliver such abstractions as mathematical concepts and humor. That which is more comfortably communicated in written or spoken form (sentences or equations) is conscripted into a visual format built from the media available at the time.

Outsiders entering the mainstream

Statistical graphics and cartoons both have the feeling of “outsider art,” with an uneasy relation to more accepted forms of data analysis or storytelling. This may perhaps be most apparent when considering the visual outputs of such outsiders to the mainstream as sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois (see Figure 7A) and the Creole artist George Herriman (see Figure 7b), with his aslant artistry and humor that featured a genderfluid cat.

Figures 7a and 7b. W. E.B. Du Bois, who established the first American school of sociology at Atlanta University, created a series of boldly colorful and geometric graphs depicting a social study of Black life in the U.S., exhibited in 1900. The above example (left) depicts the “proportion of almshouse paupers in every 100,000” Black citizens. George Herriman’s Krazy Kat (right), which ran from 1913 to 1944 (this example is from 1942), was groundbreaking not only in its audacious design and narrative, but also in that Herriman was a Creole artist of national importance, and that his character Krazy was unequivocally genderfluid.

The meat of a scientific analysis or policy report will typically involve some mathematical modeling, with graphics being used for exploration or communication. There is a general recognition that exploration is a crucial component of learning from data, and communication is necessary in all areas of science, technology, and decision making—but graphics have traditionally been seen as less of a science and, at best, a form of practical art. Only recently have exploratory data analysis and visualization been formalized as part of statistical workflow; this has come during a period in which statistics has combined with data science and machine learning into a field in which computing is as important as mathematics. Visualization has moved closer to the mainstream of science.

Meanwhile, the role of comics in popular and literary culture has changed several times since 1900, moving from disposable newspaper strips, to wildly popular entertainment for children in the form of comic-book and television animations, to become a form of genre literature and, more recently, source material for popular movies. Commercially this has been a series of ups and downs, but from a cultural perspective, comics have followed the paths of crime fiction and science fiction into literary respectability. As with these other genres, comics retains its own insular culture along with some outlaw mentality.

In their modern forms, comics and statistical graphics both lean on conventions, some of which have become so familiar that they feel nearly invisible. For example, we take it for granted in Western culture that a time series runs from left to right, that comics run from left to right and from top to bottom of the page (except when they don’t), that the horizontal axis on a scatterplot represents a predictor and the vertical axis represents the outcome, that the wedges in a pie chart add up to 100%, that a “pow!” exploding with stars conveys a painful punch in the face and that overlapping speech balloons convey interruption, and so on (see Figures 8a and 8b). These conventions can sometimes overwhelm legibility, as with the popular but notoriously difficult-to-read parallel-y-axis plot or baroquely hyperkinetic superhero fight scenes. As with genre literature, reliance on conventions facilitates new developments for insiders that can baffle readers who are unfamiliar with the form, which in turn motivates the sorts of swings between sophistication and simplicity that are characteristic of the history of popular music.

Figures 8a and 8b. We understand the motion and pain of the frog from the conventions of simple lines, swirls, and stars in this 1945 edition of Ernie Bushmiller’s comic strip Nancy (left). Likewise, the spare, unadorned presentation of points and lines conveys the covariation in the 1958 plot by Alban William Phillips (right), which efficiently depicts a historical relationship between inflation and unemployment in a now-familiar format of data and fitted curve, while at the same time arguably being misleading due to the convention that a scatterplot represents a causal relationship.

Mathematics, too, has advanced through the use of conventions, such as Leibiniz’s notation in differential calculus, or even more basic ideas such as the expression of mathematical reasoning in equations rather than words. Just as we can read an English sentence without needing to be aware of the individual letters in the words, and we can follow basic algebraic expressions without needing to puzzle over the meaning of the equals sign, we are accustomed to time series plots and sequential panels speech balloons and can see through these forms directly to the stories and data being conveyed.

Differences between these two modes of visual storytelling

Comics have been used to teach statistics, and data graphics have been used within comic strips; quantitative visualizations can be beautiful and comics can be informative. But these two forms of expression are generally used in different places and with different goals: explanation and mathematical understanding in one case, art and entertainment in the other. And yet, both have in common a mission of delivering an abstract concept efficiently within the constraints of their inherent structures, requiring such conventions as economy of line and messaging that registers intuitively for the reader. 

Different goals lead to different visual priorities: clarity in data graphics is absolutely necessary if any useful information is to be conveyed, whereas ambiguity in comics can help create suspense, point of view, and other dramatic effects. Comics, as with purely literary stories, typically follow a narrative structure—or, if not, are consciously operating in opposition to conventional narrative. In contrast, statistical graphics on the page are often static, taking the form of a single display rather than a sequence.

The content of single-panel cartoons and statistical graphs require a short but concentrated effort by the reader, while the sequentiality of comics leads to a much different reading experience. Most comics, like most films and works of literature, offer a guided reading experience, a sort of theme park ride in which the reader follows a story through a sequence of panels: in addition to providing the words and images, the authors dictate the structure and pace of the narrative. In contrast, when reading a time series or scatterplot, we perceive a general pattern and then can then focus on individual segments or points. When a graph is constructed as a trellis, or grid of small multiples, this just adds one more level for the reader, who can now slide up and down between individual points, subgraphs, and the entire picture. Indeed, we would argue that the sequentiality of comics and the all-at-onceness of statistical graphs are fundamental characteristics of these forms.

An early example of a small-multiples graph is Francis Amasa Walker’s state-by-state “gainful occupations” grid of 1874 (see Figure 9a), which appeared a century after William Hogarth’s groundbreaking series of prints of the Rake’s Progress. To the extent that each of Hogarth’s scenes is itself a detailed storyboard, the sequence as a whole feels less like a comic strip or bande dessinée and more like a sequence of static images.

Figures 9a and 9b. Francis Amasa Walker’s 1874 small-multiples graph lays out the ratios of those above the age of 10 who were employed or in school in the U.S., with each box representing a state (left). Hergé’s 1932 Tintin en Amérique (right) is similarly divided into discrete panels but, unlike the statistical graph, is intended to be read in order so that it forms a narrative..

A modern comic can be drawn beautifully, but its individual panels are directly read as part of a story rather than as individual tableaus. With statistical graphics, it is the opposite. News organizations now sometimes construct interactive data visualizations that explicitly guide the viewer, but to the extent that graphics support exploratory data analysis, it is often essential that the reading experience be open-ended and not directed by the creator of the graph.

Somewhere in between are dynamic scatterplots such as those developed and popularized by Hans Rosling, in which each circle represents a country and the graph refreshes for each year, with movement of the circles showing changes over time (see Figure 10a). From the audience’s perspective, this sort of “movie” is more of a guided tour than an open-ended exploration. It becomes an exploratory tool when the user is given the power to stop the motion of the image and look around, and to select what variables to display. The creation of animated graphs in open-source software such as R or Python facilitates both analysis and presentation when it comes to machine learning and is becoming standard with the younger generation of data-crunchers, and flowing geometries can be beautiful.

As discussed earlier, data visualization and comics both rely on conventions that serve as shortcuts to legibility. The establishment of conventions also gives the opportunity to push back against expectations, whether it be poems that don’t rhyme, machine-made art, neo-noir film, countercultural science fiction, or comic books and bandes dessinées such as Maus, Watchmen, and the Spirou of Émile Bravo that use traditionally genre materials to tell more serious stories. We see less of this sort of reaction in statistical graphics (setting aside jokes such as pie charts representing actual slices of pie or gimmick graphs such as bar plots showing the heights of buildings).

Figures 10a and 10b. The Swedish physician Hans Rosling developed and popularized the Trendalyzer software system that facilitates dynamic scatterplots that animate sequentially across time (left). Since the late 20th century, Chris Ware has been innovating comic strips and graphic storytelling with designs that sometimes resemble charts or technical drafting, as in this example from 2010 (right). He often bucks the conventions of temporal order with narratives that are chronologically shattered.

The arrow of time

A detective story will typically involve two time sequences: the forward sequence of (a) the motivation for the crime, (b) the planning of the crime, (c) the crime itself, (d) the aftermath, (e) the arrival of the detective, (f) the collection of clues, (g) the discovery of the solution of the crime, and (h) the unmasking and punishment or escape of the criminal. But this is not quite the sequence given in the story, which will typically follow an order such as d, e, f, c, g, b, a, h. These two different sequences roughly correspond to the processes of data generation and inference in statistics. Data generation goes forward in chronological time, while inference starts in the middle and goes back and forth in time.

The strict ordering that is typical of comics (setting aside experimental work such as that of Chris Ware; see Figure 10b) implies that some decisions need to be made about the sequence by which the story is experienced by the reader. In contrast, a static graph that appears all at once can imply different stories, depending on the order with which it is read. The title and caption of a graph can thus have a strong effect on its meaning, in the same way that point of view is important in storytelling.

Looking forward

It took a while for the methods of data visualization to detach from their original sources in mapping, astronomy, and economic and demographic time series; similarly, sequential art was slow to move into new domains beyond reportage and humor.

Both fields feature a series of technical developments that have facilitated communication through juxtaposition. A time-series plot contains no more information than a series of numbers, and a scatterplot is just a way of displaying a two-column table—but graphics allow visual comparisons in a way that the numbers do not. Similarly, a political cartoon or a single-panel gag employs a discrete, often uncomplicated tableau of squiggly ink lines and perhaps a splash of color to communicate the many layers of meaning that make up a joke or a sharp commentary. A sequential cartoon, in contrast, can be thought of as an annotated series of images or as illustrated prose, but it is more than either of these. In a graphic narrative, the forward progress of the story is governed by the architecture of the content flowing panel to panel. Advances in statistical graphics and comics have come from ever-evolving conventions such as grids of scatterplots and strips of panels, which represent conceptual leaps and in turn open the door to further developments.

At the same time, historical contingencies and the imperatives of commerce can lead to developments that are inherently unpredictable. To think of comics as a set of variations on the superhero form would be as limiting as to consider pie charts and histograms as the building blocks of statistical graphics. Superheroes, pie charts, and the cozy detective story are examples of subgenres that have taken up too large a space of their genres in the popular imagination, motivating strong reactions against these forms among authors and designers. When the goal is communication–whether to convey information or to tell a story-–there is a tension between the convenience of existing popular forms and the need to innovate to shake readers out of existing modes of thinking.

It has taken applied researchers a long time to realize that graphical visualizations of data and models are not just decorations to be added to make statistical results more accessible to lay readers; rather, they are a necessary part of any serious quantitative analysis. Similarly, the techniques and conventions of cartoons and comics are not just a way to make jokes or stories more accessible to children, any more than movies are just filmed books. In the famous words of Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message.

Recognizing these historical parallels can point to potential future developments. We are in no position to say where comics and bandes dessinées, or literary or visual art more generally, could or should go next. But we can comment on something that statistical graphics can learn from comics, which is how to add some structure to the viewing experience. It should be possible to design graphs to support discovery of the unexpected without entirely leaving readers on their own during the process. This is especially a concern with big data: when the dataset is large and complicated enough, even an attempt to visualize all the data at once will require some choices. One way to approach this is to construct a sequence of graphs, starting with the big picture and then focusing on details. It can also help to accompany a graph with text suggesting how it is to be read, perhaps with further explanation using a sequence of images or a video. Shneiderman offers similar suggestions for computer-user interfaces, which is what data graphics are nowadays. A certain amount of storytelling or imposed structure can be necessary in the interpretation of data, just as we often need to embed real-world events into narratives in order to understand them.

The post Statistical Graphics and Comics: Parallel Histories of Visual Storytelling appeared first on Nightingale.

Reflecting on our collective progress, I often think about my mother. In 1997, when I was 12, she launched her own event-planning business. She juggled work, parenting, and everything in between, showing me that women could “have it all”–but also how much effort it takes to make that possible. Despite the challenges, I knew I wanted to create a career on my terms, blending flexibility and purpose.

In 2019, I started my own design company, specializing in user experience and branding. As I built my business, I noticed a pattern. Former female employers connected me to clients, female friends became collaborators, and women in my network were the foundation of my success. Our collective advancement is extremely interconnected. Thinking more about the broader story of women’s advancement, I was interested in examining how individual contributions can lead to systemic change that creates further opportunity.

To explore this idea, I turned to data visualization. I wanted to honor women’s progress by mapping some key milestones that have shaped our journey, focusing on legal, economic, and social achievements. From the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 to the election of Kamala Harris as Vice President in 2021, I wanted to see how these moments align—and how the momentum they created could be visualized.

Inspired by the cyclical nature of history, we designed a spiral timeline, where events radiate outward from a central point. The spiral symbolizes progress that builds on itself: history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. Larger circles indicate clusters of activity, while color-coded data-points—like political milestones or social movements—help viewers trace patterns. The heatmap helps emphasize how bursts of progress ripple outward, creating energy that sustains movements over time.

For me, the most striking discovery that this visualization brought to life was the pattern in the chain of events, represented through colors listed in the Event Type key. The colors show how a movement can spark new laws that open doors for individuals to rise into power, creating new opportunities for others as they do so. This data story is a reminder that progress isn’t always linear, but it’s always worth pursuing. In mapping part of our collective history, we can better understand where we’ve been, how we got here, and how to manage the future. Let’s keep charting the spiral outward, together.

The post Charting Progress: Mapping Women’s Advancement in Entrepreneurship and Financial Inclusion appeared first on Nightingale.

One reason to envy information designers of yesterday is the big canvases they got to play with. Look at this 1831 timeline compared to my iPhone. Big, right?

Time goes to the right. Different empires get their own swim lanes and colorful designations. Maybe you’ve seen something similar to this before.

But if you squint and read its title, you will see that this is Plate 1. The timeline keeps going . . . and going!

An Embellished Chart of General History and Chronology is an extraordinary work of chronography from 1831 London. Considering the history of colorful timelines, it stands out in many ways:

1. It is huge.
2. It is relatively early.
3. It seems unknown to modern researchers.
4. It is by a woman.

Frances Harriet Lightfoot published her chronology when she was 29 years old. More on her in a bit.

The design

Seven of the chronology’s plates fold out, including Plate 4, below. It’s a vertical monster—about 3 feet tall covering the final 500 years of the BC era. I count 134 distinct geopolitical rows.

If we zoom to the Golden Age of Athens on the same plate you can appreciate the chronology’s level of detail. I particularly like how years specific to events are labeled.

Lightfoot’s design jumps scales in the AD era. The same horizontal space is used to detail only 100 years, giving five times more room to illustrate history.

If we fly to the Roman Civil wars of the Tetrarchy we see how crazy a single lane can get!

Lightfoot’s volume begins with a three-paragraph preface, where she refers to herself in the third person:

. . . a work which is the offspring of research rather than of genius ; and it appeared to her that the study of Chronology might be rendered more attractive to the rising generation, by a new arrangement, in the form of the Chronological Tables, combining simplicity with comprehensiveness. . . .

She also includes a list of subscribing sponsors, and dozens of reference pages split between a long table of remarkable events not noticed in the chart, and table of celebrated persons grouped by theme (geographers, mathematicians, poets, etc.).

I studied two copies of Lightfoot’s chronology for this essay. Most of the images you see are from photography recently published by the David Rumsey Map Collection. I also consulted my own recently acquired copy. It’s fun comparing the differences in their hand coloring.

To me, the sensation of discovering and reading this work is overwhelming. As much as I have enjoyed its colors, my deepest curiosity is reserved for its creator.

Who is Miss Lightfoot? How did she come to create this monumental piece of information design? Why have I never heard of her?

After spending several days studying census, newspaper, and other public records, I have pieced together what I believe to be her first biographical sketch.

Meet Frances Harriet

Frances Harriet Lightfoot was born around 1802 in Lambeth, Surrey. She was a distinguished composer and author whose works left a broad mark in the 19th century.

Lightfoot signed off on the publication of her chronology from 14 Great James Street, New Palace (London) on October 1, 1831. It received coverage in the Sun (London) newspaper the following month:

“This work is so ingeniously arranged as to afford at once glance a clear and comprehensive representation of the state of all known contemporary nations, from the Deluge to the present period. A system better calculated to facilitate the acquisition of this most puzzling, yet most valuable part of historical knowledge could hardly, we should think, be imagined; but we are not aware of even the existence of another book which possesses similar advantages, or has any claims to rival it in the public estimation.”

—Sun newspaper, 30 November 1831

About 136 copies of the chronology were listed for subscribers, including a resident of Willsbridge House, indicating an early connection to Lightfoot’s future home. The subscriber list featured a varied and high-status group, including dukes, earls, admirals, baronets, and notable politicians, reflecting the publication’s support by many elites of society.

Today, about 15 copies of the work survive according to WorldCat, with ten in the UK and five in the USA.

Professorial ventures

A decade after the chronology’s publication, in 1841, Lightfoot lived with her father and her mother, also Frances Lightfoot. They were still at 14 James Street in the parish of St Margaret, Westminster, Middlesex. In addition to her parents, Frances Harriet, listed as a “Professor of Music,” lived with three other women.

In addition to her 1831 publication, Lightfoot authored A Genealogical List of the Sovereigns of England (1838), a stylized table across 13 pages.

She also published French Participles Explained and Made Easy in 1845, showcasing her diverse intellectual interests. But Lightfoot’s most prolific format was musical scores. Between 1828 and 1855, her compositions included ballads, songs, and duets, often collaborating with women lyricists. These musical pursuits align with her listed professional occupation of “Professor of Music” and her involvement in education, as reflected in her census household records, which frequently included pupils and other boarders.

By 1851, Frances Harriet had moved to 41 Cadogan Place in the prestigious Belgravia neighborhood of London where she was now head of a household including her 86-year-old mother, and several other women, including one visiting teacher, a pupil, and servants. There, she continued her professional pursuits, again listed as a “Professor of Music,” demonstrating her enduring commitment to education and the arts:

In 1861, Frances Harriet was recorded as a “School Mistress” at Willsbridge House in Bitton and Oldland. This residence, later known as Willsbridge Castle, has some musical roots. Built circa 1730 for John Pearsall, it passed through the Pearsall family, including composer Robert Lucas de Pearsall, known for his madrigals and Anglican church music. The house’s connection to such a prominent musical figure aligns with Frances Harriet’s own musical background.

Across 1851 and 1861 censuses, Lightfoot’s household included teachers and students, all women, reflecting her ongoing commitment to education and music.

Final years and legacy

Frances Harriet Lightfoot passed away aged 71 years old on July 14, 1873, at Willsbridge House. She was buried five days later at St. Mary Churchyard, Bitton, South Gloucestershire. Her will named two executors, with an estate valued under £600.

Lightfoot’s one-acre residence was auctioned the following January at the White Lion Hotel, Broad Street, Bristol. Willsbridge House was described as a substantial mansion with extensive amenities including stables, a coach house, a detached laundry, and well-maintained gardens, highlighted the grandeur of her home. The house itself featured spacious cellars, multiple reception rooms, numerous bedrooms, and a garden stocked with fruit trees and an abundant mineral spring. Its proximity to the Bitton Station on the Midland Railway further underscored its prime location.

These connections paint a picture of Frances Harriet Lightfoot as a well-connected, intellectually versatile, and respected figure in the musical circles of her time. They also suggest a woman who maintained significant properties and professional roles, demonstrating both stability and influence.

The consistent reference to Lightfoot as a spinster in various documents, including her will, indicates she remained unmarried throughout her life, which was relatively uncommon for women of her time and social status. This detail might have influenced her professional focus and independence.

Frances Harriet Lightfoot’s life reflects a woman deeply embedded in the intellectual and artistic fabric of her time. I am excited to learn about what you find studying her colossal chronology.

Lightfoot is a good reminder that the constellation of spectacular historic designs is only partially visible to our modern eyes. I look forward to seeing more.

Republished from https://www.chartography.net/p/colossal-chronography – sign up, it’s great!

The post Colossal Chronography: Frances Harriet Lightfoot’s 1831 Marvel appeared first on Nightingale.

Unfold it to drape across your couch like a blanket or examine it on a table like a road map. The Temple operates as a self-documenting system to understand and memorize a world history narrative. It is a perspective rendering of a vast hall, in which time is the distance from the back wall of Creation. The wall pillars are centuries holding up time bands of ceiling labeled with categories of famous people arranged. The pillars on the right display the names of famous rulers. At the foot of the pillars world events flow towards our eye on the left while the names of battles flow forward on the right.

When Richard Saul Wurman proposed five ways to organize information, he described Time as “an easily understandable framework from which changes can be observed and comparisons made.” (Information Anxiety 2, 41). While Wurman was trained as an architect, he was not suggesting that time would be a good principle for designing a building. He had something more linear and singular in mind, a chronological chart of events, the now familiar one-dimensional timeline. 

Emma Willard had something much more ambitious in mind when she published her first perspective time chart, “Pictures of Nations or Perspective Sketch of the Course of Empire” in Atlas to Accompany a System of Universal History In 1836. The Picture of Nations is reproduced in this beautifully designed book along with the other technique Willard excelled at, the chronological series of maps. The selection is edited with extensive commentary by the historian Susan Schulten. There are pages where Willard speaks for herself, as in this quote:

Mere straight lines not wrought into a picture, and presenting no form of comeliness to the eye, are unattractive. The young (and the old too) do not feel any wish to look at them, and thus they carry away no distinct impression. They are like a succession of monotonous sounds, which no one remembers; while the arrangement of sounds in tunes, or lines in pictures, are attended to with pleasure, and easily remembered. (70)

To which Schulten adds, “Willard distinguished ‘pictures’ of information from ‘mere’ timelines in that the former added up to something greater than just the display of data.” Anyone involved in information design will agree. We can be drawn into the narrative of history as a building, of events distant in time and in space flowing towards us, of pillars and ceilings engraved with the names of famous men and a few queens, an arrangement of events we should memorize to understand the past. Willard’s work is among the Information Graphic Visionaries series because she made that leap towards the memorable. Without these innovative diagrams and history maps, her textbooks would be as invisible today as those of her more conventional male contemporaries. 

Inventing a nation in timelines

Schulten and others have written eloquently about Willard as a pioneer of women’s education. She is a representative of the first born-American generation, a unique place in the American history she chose to represent in her maps and timelines. A child of a colonial-era New England farming family—she, her students, and the readers of her textbooks were not in England anymore. They were the first citizens to define their new country’s territory and history. 

One pillar of Willard’s Temple, already a cornerstone of this new identity, was the adoption of Columbus as the starting point of American history. The first public celebration of Columbus Day was organized in 1792 by a New York political club. They embraced  the 300^th anniversary of an event that took place in the Caribbean, honoring a man who never touched or acknowledged the existence of North America as the start of a national identity. This group called themselves the Society of St. Tammany, the Sons of St. Tammany, or the Columbian Order. Tammany Societies were nativist political clubs created during the Revolutionary War to support the new republic, and Columbia became a favored term for the new nation. Tammany was a reference to Tamamend, a mythical leader of the Delaware (Lenni Lenape), and society members appropriated indigenous titles to support their sense of ‘nativeness’. From Willard’s generation onwards, American history began by counting 300 years backwards from 1792.

While Willard’s Temple design is entirely original, it is also a mashup of previous authors’ timeline techniques and metaphors. Schulten’s essay does an excellent job of explaining these predecessors and influences. I will add a few more examples and place Willard’s work conceptually along two axes: as a timeline that synchronizes sacred and profane historical ideas and as an expression of American nationalist narrative. With that in mind, let us look at what Willard built her temple from, and what she chose to include and exclude from its floor, ceiling, and pillars, as well as from her maps.

Rosenberg and Grafton begin Cartographies of Time with the questions “What does history look like? How do you draw time?” This is the wrong question to ask. Designing a timeline does not revolve around the question of what time looks like. A timeline is a narrative constructed from visual signposts. Any narrative has a beginning, middle and end. The designer must address three questions: where does time begin, what does it include and where does it end? Once these questions are answered, the appearance of time can have any form that supports the visual logic of sequence.

For the students of Willard’s Troy Female Seminary, the beginning of time had to be the date proposed by Bishop Ussher’s 17^th century analysis of the Book of Genesis, four thousand and four years before the birth of Christ. Time starts with the names of people and events in the Bible, and continues to ancient Greek and Roman texts, concluding with events remembered by modern European nations. Willard embraced this scheme and steadfastly stuck with it throughout her work. Her end of time took the shape of twenty-one modern nations grouped into four categories: Northern Europe outside the Roman Empire, Europe formed from the Roman Empire, Mahometan (Islamic), and Pagan Nations. The exception in these categories were “those of the Western Continent” included in the Roman Empire nations, the parting of the English and Iberian colonial rivers to reveal the Republic of America, Mexico and South American Republics. Given pride of place, these new creations were at the center of history.

Detail from Temple of Time poster, present time (1846) showing the Americas, Emma Willard, Maps of History, Susan Schulten, 2022

Châtelain’s 18th century method

There were other approaches to representing time that did not combine Biblical, Classical and Modern sources. Henri Abraham Châtelain made a different choice with similar material a hundred years earlier. His Atlas historique, which went through several editions in the early 1700s, was a multi-volume book of maps, lineage diagrams, and essays summarizing the European understanding of the world. Châtelain’s timeline of human history was a presentation of Church and State History side by side rather than combining them or suppressing one view for the other. His solution was simultaneity rather than synthesis. The two-page spread of the Chaine de l’histoire sacrée (Chain of sacred history) and Chaine de l’histoire prophane (Chain of profane history) share a similar time scale. Time begins using Ussher’s date for the creation of the world, though dates are labeled forwards to 4000 (our conventional Year 0) rather than backwards, then continue to 1713 (the present). The facing pages describe parallel lineages of Church history, visualizes Old Testament patriarchs and kings flowing into dead branches of Roman Jerusalem, then on to the Western and Eastern church. State history begins with Assyrian, Egyptian and Italian monarchs, along with a reference to, the Chinese empire..

Chaine de L’Histoire Sacrée : Chain De L’Histoire Prophane, Atlas historique, Tom I. No. 3. Henri Abraham Châtelain, 1718 (David Rumsey Historical Map Collection)

Châtelain was a French Huguenot minister who preached in London and Amsterdam; an artist-engraver who designed and drew many of the plates and maps included in the books he published, and essentially a person who combined sacred and profane practice in his own life. He may have had business and political reasons for omitting any reference to the Reformation in his visualization of sacred time.

Châtelain’s publications described the world by combining maps, timelines, and text. The atlas documented an interconnected world defined by European international trade and travel. While most of the globe is represented in the maps and texts, a notable exception is the interior and western coast of North America. It is worthwhile having a close look at the map that covers the same area that Willard will include in her historical map series. 

Map of Canada or New France, and the Discoveries Made There (Carte du Canada ou de la Nouvelle France, & des Découvertes qui y ont été faites) was based on the work of the cartographer Guillaume De L’Isle. It presents a view of North America gazing northwest. embracing the entire Great Lakes and upper Mississippi basin.  Most of the map is covered with the names of the indigenous nations that made up the population of Canada ou Nouvelle France. 

Detail of Carte du Canada ou de la Nouvelle France, & des Découvertes qui y ont été faites, Atlas historique, Tom VI. No. 20. Henri Abraham Châtelain, 1718 (David Rumsey Historical Map Collection)

This map of New France is not the map of a nation. De L’isle has drawn a territory in which French and English settlements were coexisting and trading with indigenous populations. In his most recent re-evaluation of North America during this period, Pekka Hämäläinen makes the argument that New France was an alliance among French settlers and indigenous nations to support extractive trade in exchange for useful technologies. “In a striking contrast to most English colonies,” he writes, “New France was built on close collaboration with the Indians, who became trading partners, military allies, and kin over the course of the seventeenth century.” (Indigenous Continent, 209) He makes a convincing case that it was the competition among the indigenous nations, fueled by intentional or unintentional European trade, rather than European imperial policies, that determined where settlements could survive. The region south of Lake Ontario in the De L’Isle map is labeled Iroquois, a label I will come back to when discussing Willard’s 1828 textbook below. The many groups and settlements shown on this French map demonstrate just how not empty North America was. Reading Hämäläinen’s historical narrative alongside Maps of History reveals how American Federalist nationalism shaped the way Willard represented European and indigenous people.

By the time Willard is making her maps and timelines, North America is not just a place in a World Atlas, it is the place where the American nation enters world history. How did this first-generation information visionary integrate her view of American history with the history of the world? Glancing back at the Temple of Time, we can see that the five pillars closest to the present on the left represent the New World. Going further back in time, these pillars are blank. “King Philip 1675” inscribed on the pillar for the 17^th century is the only trace of indigenous American culture. The inscription urges the students of Troy Female Academy to remember Metacomet, the Wampanoag military leader, renamed King Philip by the English, a reference to the son of Alexander the Great. Willard made a place for her proto-nation’s first serious military enemy, the leader who tried but failed to drive the European settlers out of New England. 

Detail from Temple of Time poster, showing significant dates on the century pillars for the Americas, Emma Willard, Maps of History, Susan Schulten, 2022

North America in charts, streams, and pillars

Willard’s representation of North America is a series of choices. We can appreciate the choices she makes by looking at similar materials in timelines by Joseph Priestley and Friedrich Strass. Priestley starts time at 1200 B.C. based on textual evidence from the Shepherd Kings, Egyptians, and Israelites. His sense of historical time is based on written texts rather than religious faith. Empires rise and fall without reference to the light of a messiah. His Unitarian theology counts down to zero at the birth of Christ marked only by a symbol –    –  and up again to 1800. All modern nations (Italy) or regions (Africa) are given a horizontal band to label their transition from one empire or kingdom to the next. In his row of empires that become the American continents, Priestley finds a place for the 13^th century founding of the Kingdom of Peru and the Empire of Mexico, so they can transition to SPANISH in the 16^th century. The other labels that make up this row are European names and nationalities. 

Detail of the Americas from A new chart of history, Joseph Priestley, 1769 (David Rumsey Historical Map Collection)

Friedrich Strass’ Der Strom der Zeiten (Streams of Time) begins time the same way Willard does. The world emerges from the clouds in 4004 and a series of cultural streams begin to flow downward to the present. The only reference to the Americas are small colonial side channels flowing into and out of the rivers of French, Spanish, Portuguese, and English history near the bottom of the chart. 

Detail of present time (1803) for the streams of Spain, Portugal, England, Der Strom der Zeiten/Streams of Time, Friedrich Strass, 1803 (David Rumsey Historical Map Collection)

The Americanness of the Temple of Time can also be seen in how Willard absorbed and modified another feature of Priestley’s system, categories of famous people. Priestley’s Chart of Biography grouped famous individuals into six categories and included 2000 names.  Statesmen and Warriors were one category. Both theological and political philosophers were grouped in Divines and Metaphysicians. He had the agenda of religious dissent and social reform behind his selection and categorization of historical figures.

Willard was set on establishing historical conventions rather than challenging them. She uses a simplified approach, with five categories and about 300 names. Europeans who claimed American territory (Columbus, Cabot, De Gama, Gilbert, Verazani [sic], Smith) are in Philosophers, Discoverers &c. Religious leaders who founded English colonies (Penn, R. Williams) are Theologians. The Spanish who took over in Central and South American nations (Cortez and Pizarro) are in Warriors. 

Schulten notes that the floor of Willard’s Temple evolved from her earlier Picture of Nations, and both can be compared to Priestley’s and Strass’ timelines. It is not surprising that these European and American timelines were Eurocentric. It is more surprising to note the non-European people and events they chose to include or omit. There is far more non-European history in Priestley’s 18^th century chart than Willard includes sixty years later. While it starts with entirely Mediterranean sources, the top third of present time in Priestley’s chart resolves into America, Africa, China, and India. He uses color to show how the Mongolian Empire included China, Persia, Turkey and Russia.

The metaphor of streams and the downward (vertical) flow of Strass’ design suggests that the present world flows from the people that emerged from Creation, a world that included the Chinese. Modern history flows from these original streams, though Strass has to add a few examples of later creation to account for German and Nordic origins. 

Willard starts with a similar set of Mediterranean sources emerging from Creation. She recognizes India and China much later than her predecessors. Their streams only appear after the light that represents the birth of Christ. The part of the floor that will become the Pagan Nations has no content until “Degama [sic] discovers India” and European trade begins. She makes chronological mistakes in Asian history, placing Jenghis Khan and Tamerlaine in the correct century on the pillars but reversing their position on the floor.

Priestley’s Africa shows six hundred years of history leading to the 18^th century North African kingdoms of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli.

Detail of showing the nations of North Africa from A new chart of history, Joseph Priestley, 1769 (David Rumsey Historical Map Collection)

Willard’s American version has no Africa per se. The Temple of Time does show Egypt and adds Barbary between Turkey and Persia. A stream emerges on the floor from the Moguls that reads, “The Two Brothers Barbarosso Found the Piratical States of Barbary”.  It ends with the text, “First brought to terms by the Americans”. This is a reference to the Barbary Wars, also remembered as “the shores of Tripoli” in the American Marine’s Hymn.  It also illustrates that one criteria for inclusion in history is warfare.

Detail from the Temple of Time showing the place of Barbary between Turkey and Persia, with text referring to the Barbary Wars.

Native Americans as barbarians that vanish and reappear

The wars between indigenous nations and the English colonies and the new United States are given more attention in her historical maps than in her timelines.  She sets the stage with a map that presents the area that would become the United States before European settlements: Locations and Wanderings of the Aboriginal Tribes.

What was this image based on and what purpose did it serve? Willard was an educator and a writer of history books, not a proto-ethnographer. Schulten’s essay, “A Graphic Mind”, provides an answer. Before creating her History of the United States, Willard published her Ancient Atlas, a book of maps to support the teaching of Mediterranean/European history. “The most interesting of these was the map of barbarian invasions, which collapsed centuries of migration across Europe onto a single image,” Schulten writes. She points out that the map, titled Migrations, Settlements &c. of Barbarous Tribes, was adapted from the 1820 American edition of the Lesage Atlas. That map, titled Invasion of the Barbarians their origin, settlements, dispersion, &c., illustrates a text that summarizes the movement of tribes invading the Western Roman Empire from the 4^th century. The map shows groups from Scandinavia, Central Asia, and North Africa tracing colorful lines across Europe.

Left: Detail of Iberia from Geographical and Historical Map of the Incursions of the Barbarians, Incursion of the Barbarians, their origin, settlements, dispersion, &c., A Complete Genealogical, Historical, Chronological, And Geographical Atlas; Being A General Guide To History, Both Ancient And Modern … According To The Plan Of Le Sage, Greatly Improved. The Whole Forming A Complete System Of History And Geography. 1820 (David Rumsey Historical Map Collection). Right: Detail of Ibera from Map No, VI, Migrations, Settlements &c. of barbarous Tribes illustrating the account which is given of them in Willard’s Ancient Geography, Ancient Atlas to Accompany Universal Geography, Emma Willard, 1827. (David Rumsey Historical Map Collection). 

A look at migrations across the Iberian peninsula in both of these maps shows how Willard simplified the visual language introduced in Lesage. She removes much of the geographic detail and adds directional arrows. She employed the same visual language in her Locations and Wanderings map to suggest the changing location of indigenous groups before and during the English colonial period. In the context of Ancient History, the movement of these tribes was a disruption of the Roman Imperial order, until ultimately Burgundians founded Burgundy, Lombards settled Lombardy, and Normans built up the same sites they had looted and burned in Normandy. 

Detail of Introductory Map To Accompany Willard’s History Of The United States, Locations and Wanderings of the Aboriginal Tribes, A Series of Maps to Willard’s History of the United States, Or, Republic Of America. 1829. (David Rumsey Historical Map Collection)

For the historical atlas of America, she starts with a chapter describing theories of how people arrived in the Americas (across the Bering Strait, up the Mississippi river network) and another that enumerates “the Principal Indian Confederacies as found by European Discoverers.” The visualization for this section is analogous to the wanderings of Old World barbarians. Surrounded by oval labels that claim no territory, these tribes are neither kingdoms or states. The invading arrows of Iroquois or Five Nations project southwards into Irocoisia Proper. The Tuscaroras move from south to north while the Lenni Lenape move from east to west, and the Shawanese wander from upper Florida to the Ohio River network. The movement of the confederacies introduces their anticipated transient role in American history. 

In the maps accompanying Part 1 of her four-part chronology, all indigenous nations vanish from the interior. Her maps focus on the thin strips of coastline and rivers that made up the English colonial world. Indigenous people reappear as insets labeled Places Mentioned in the History of the Pequod War in the Third Map of 1643 and Places Mentioned in the History of King Philip’s War in the Fourth Map of 1692. The educational value is memorizing the names of the combatants and locations of the wars that traumatized the English colonies. The Fifth Map of 1755 shows the names of the indigenous people who controlled the interior of the southern colonies—Tuscarora, Cawataba, Congaree, Yamasee, Cherokee, and Apalachee—but the area west of the coastal rivers remains empty. It is only in the Sixth Map of 1765 that she actually includes an indigenous nation with territory, the Country of the Six Nations. Here she acknowledges that before the American Revolution the Iroquois Confederacy controlled all of what is now New York State west of the Hudson Valley.

Detail of Sixth Map or Map Of 1763 showing Iroquois territory before the American Revolution. (David Rumsey Historical Map Collection)

The Appearance of the American Far West

In the Ninth Map of 1826, referred to in the History as the Map of the Present Day, many of the previously excluded nations represented in the De L’Isle map of New France reappear. Her introductory map showed the unwandering people of the southeast—Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek. In 1826 they were still in their towns, but the Indian Removal Act of 1830 is about to expel them from the newly created states of Mississippi and Alabama. The other prehistoric wandering tribes are gone, replaced by people who have been engaged with French and British colonial trade for generations, now framed inside recently created American states. Illinois is land “ceded by the Kaskaskias” and Arkansas is “part of the tract ceded by the Quapaws”.

Ninth Map or Map of 1826, A Series of Maps to Willard’s History of the United States, Or, Republic Of America. 1829. (David Rumsey Historical Map Collection)

But the most interesting detail of the Map of 1826 is the depiction of the Far West in the upper left. The North West Territory is labeled, Those lands possessed in common by the Sioux, Chippewas, Winnebago, and Sauks, an assertion that would have been news to the people who lived there. The western boundary of this territory is the upper Mississippi.

Beyond that is a space with no boundaries labeled Sioux Indians or Naudowessies. It was into that blank space that George Catlin went to seek his fortune in 1830. Catlin, born in 1796, was twelve years younger than Emma Willard, but it is still fair to describe him as being of that same born-American generation. His family background was similar to Willard’s, with farm family roots in Connecticut. When the young Catlin was sent by his father to study and practice law in Litchfield, Connecticut, Willard was already married and establishing schools for girls in Middlebury, Vermont. By the time Willard moved her school operations to New York state, Catlin had abandoned law to become a painter in Philadelphia. They crossed patrons when Catlin was commissioned to paint a portrait of DeWitt Clinton, the governor whose policies and support attracted Willard to settle in New York. 

Catlin spent six years traveling back and forth to areas west of America’s borders. He completed the first part of his project to paint hundreds of oil paintings of indigenous people and gather a huge collection of material objects. The second part of his plan was to become rich and famous by presenting his work as a public spectacle. Before opening his Indian Gallery in New York City in 1837, he staged a preview exhibit of paintings in Albany and Troy where Willard was a successful textbook author and pioneer of women’s education. There is no indication that she took this opportunity to see Catlin’s show.

I bring up Catlin because of another map, the Outline Map of Indian Localities in 1833. Catlin drew this for his most famous book, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Conditions of the North American Indian. That book was illustrated with engravings from his paintings and published in England after he packed up his collection to tour Europe in the 1840s, the same period when Willard was creating her timelines. Catlin drew this map from his travel notes and stories he collected. Here we finally see North America, undivided by northern and southern boundaries. We see the Great Plains, the Great Basin, and the Pacific Coast not yet separated into territories or states. We can see the buffalo ranges tracking the river networks and the names of the people who lived there.

Outline Map of Indian Localities in 1833, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians, George Catlin, 1842 (North Carolina Digital Collections)

If we place this map of our continent—and not the entire continent, of course, but merely that part we think of as southern Canada, the United States, and a bit of Mexico, omitting the inconvenience of Florida and the Caribbean—beside Willard’s world of 1826, we see how little of the continent was included in that early 19^th century version of American History. 

The visual power of one chart and one map

My comparisons touch on only a select few of the maps and diagrams reproduced in Maps of History. The book includes maps that depict world history, including a series that are adapted from the original work by Edward Quin. It was Quin who created the metaphor of parting clouds to reveal the parts of the globe included in world history. Willard copied this visualization of world history expanding from the Middle East to include Mediterranean Europe, Asia and Africa, and finally the globe including the Americas, adapting Quin’s design into a simpler series of maps. 

The book also reproduces two more ‘chronographer’ diagrams, a name meant to convey a combination of chronology (time) and geography (location). Following the initial Temple or Map of Time (1846), she designed Willard’s English Chronographer (1849), a building with far more detail on its walls, ceiling, and floor than the original temple, with a ceiling that included a new category of Memorable Women. The Chronographer of Ancient History (1851) was the last of these diagrams. It provided more detail for the period between creation and the birth of Christ. All are beautifully reproduced with helpful commentary.

Schulten’s essay and commentary emphasizes how Willard’s designs were meant to communicate the relationships between time and space. She quotes Willard as proudly claiming to have designed diagrams where “time is measured by space, and all time since creation of the world is indicated at once to the eye.”  

The timelines and maps clearly show how Willard was an inventive organizer and educator. Yet her building metaphor, a memory palace in which she selected and placed details for her students to remember, was as divorced from representations of geographic space as Priestley’s parallel rows or Strass’ parallel streams. It was memorable, it was orderly, but it could not simultaneously convey chronology and the relative geography of the Barbary Coast, Persia, and China.

Châtelain and Priestley shared with Willard the same goal of communicating and educating through the strength of our visual channel. In his preface to the Atlas historique, Châtelain wrote: 

La Carte est un secours que l’on fournit par les yeux à l’imagination, sauf à l’entendement après cela d’en faire son profit. (The map is assistance provided by the eye to the imagination, so that our understanding can profit by it.) 

Priestley also had enormous faith in his diagram’s power of communication. Though he wrote many books, he was convinced that visualization was superior to the text for transferring knowledge. In the booklet that accompanied his New Chart of History, he wrote:

If a person carries his eyes horizontally, he sees, in very short time, all the revolutions that have taken place in any particular country, and under whose power it is at present; and this is done with more exactness, and in much less time, than it could have been done by reading. 

Willard clearly inherits this faith in visual communication. The essays and reproductions in Maps of History help the reader appreciate her invention, the breadth of her adaptation, and the ways she viewed history and geography as a single subject. We can also see the choices she made to shape and populate her diagrams and maps. 

The last map Schulten reproduces is a map of an America we are more familiar with today than the New France of 1700 or the twenty-three American states of the 1820s. The United States of America, Historically and Chronologically Divided into Eight Parts is from Last Leaves of American History, a later textbook published in 1853. It shows America from sea to shining sea, covering the same continent that Catlin drew. 

United States of America Historically and Chronologically divided into Eight Parts, Last leaves of American history: comprising a separate history of California, Emma Willard, 1853. (Library of Congress)

Schulten’s commentary on this map provides an important point about Willard’s legacy as an information graphic visionary.

Today, the map appears ordinary, for it has been adapted as one of the central maps of American history textbooks even down to our own day. Indeed, that it has become a fixture of our national history demonstrates its symbolic power. Willard’s lasting contribution was to offer a graphic vision of Manifest Destiny that normalized the nation’s growth and gave it an almost natural, inevitable quality. The continental map includes very little information beyond the sequential parcels across the continent, even erasing any detail from neighboring nations and setting the United States apart in space. American schoolchildren have for generations seen their national expansion as relatively devoid of division or violence. Yet, ironically, it was these far western acquisitions that provoked the sectional animosity of the 1850s, which devolved into the Civil War in 1861. (220-221)

Willard saw the value in images that are simple and easy to remember. The nation is complete, with a top and a bottom, a left and a right, made of parts assembled by charter, treaty, purchase, and decree. This map includes the details we should remember and excludes the complications we don’t need to discuss. 

The decision of what to include and exclude in maps and diagrams is the responsibility of the information designer. The responsibility of the viewer is to recognize that every diagram, every map, is designed from a specific point of view. Maps of History make it possible to admire Willard’s accomplishments and take a critical look at her depiction of American history and America’s place in the history of the world. The contemporary reader can note how many of her choices are still with us in the way we view our present space and time.

The post Inclusion and Exclusion in Emma Willard, Maps of History appeared first on Nightingale.

It all started with a Thinkering Grant. 

Thinkering is a word composed of the verbs thinking and tinkering which together convey a sense of playful experimentation. Each year the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) of the University of Luxembourg funds a handful of small-scale research projects that have a relatively high chance of ‘failure’ but foster ‘creative uncertainty’ and encourage researchers in different disciplines to collaborate. 

We—Daniel Richter, Aida Horaniet Ibañez, and Joëlla van Donkersgoed—are all researchers in the C²DH and wanted to try our hand at thinkering. We were inspired by the historical census data that Daniel had collected about Brill Street, a street in the former industrial city of Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg. Daniel brought the data, Aida brought her expertise in data visualization, while Joëlla brought experience engaging city communities with their history. 

Together we ventured into a project that “physicalized” the census data of more than 100 households (almost 500 people) living on Brill Street in 1922, turning population records into a tactile, 3-dimensional, and interactive exhibit. In the end, the project gave us a glimpse into the individual houses and families who used to live there a century ago.

We hypothesized that experiencing the census data in a physical form would allow the current residents to engage with historical data about their neighborhood in a new, creative, and playful way. We wanted to design a data physicalization without statistical graphs that people of all ages could understand and recreate with simple materials such as paper, scissors, and glue—no computers, no QR codes, and no internet access required. And, most importantly, we wanted to develop a physicalization that would spark curiosity and invite them to explore the data, formulate questions, and discover a new part of the history of their neighborhood. 

On top of sparking the residents’ curiosity, the physicalization would, we hoped, lead to conversations that would help us (the historians and data visualization researchers) to discover details not shown in the raw data but known to the people living in the same neighborhood today. We hoped that by comparing residents’ knowledge of the past with the actual census data we could learn about who was included in the census (or not), which jobs were declared (or not), and where the blind spots were. Thus, the idea for “Brill Street 100 Years Ago” was born as an experimental interdisciplinary project that would foster public dialogue about history.

The data

The original data is in microfilms in the National Archive of Luxembourg (see figure 1) and contains personal information about the individual inhabitants and their living arrangements.

To understand how it was collected and interpreted at the time, Daniel prepared a set of documents to contextualize the data. He collected the blank census forms (figure 2), photographs of the street (figure 3), and a copy of the original instructions given to the households for filling out the form (figure 4). These provided insight into how the data was collected and standardized. For example: What were the criteria for how the number of rooms was counted? What kind of activities counted as an occupation, and which didn’t? Who could be counted as a member of a household, and who couldn’t?

After the collection and transcription of the data, we discussed which categories of the available data we wanted to physicalize in our design.

We intially focused on:

• number of rooms,
• number of inhabitants,
• nationalities, and
• labor categories. 

The labor categories represented a challenge since categories change throughout history – especially in regards to what had been classified as a “professional” or “technical” position in 1922. It felt important that we avoid suggesting any classes or judgements based on the labels for jobs or living arrangements because these do not translate well across time. For example, “miner” in 1922 would have been a well-respected and decently paid choice of profession, especially in an industrial town like Esch-sur-Alzette. The job lost its associated prestige when machines made the work easier in the 1930s. Therefore, we decided to show the exact profession recorded in the census and not undertake any categorization ourselves.

The interpretation of labor categories was not the only challenge in designing a physicalization with historical data. One of our initial ideas included creating a second physicalization that represented the households of Brill Street in 2022 to enable viewers to compare the data across time. Therefore, we wanted to ensure that our visual vocabulary would work for both 1922 and 2022 data. In the process, we were confronted with many definitional changes in the last 100 years – for example, back then, there were no formal concepts of dual nationalities or a gender spectrum, and since then the census has abandoned the idea of a “head of household” and the age at which one enters adulthood has changed. So, our visual vocabulary had to work for both 1922 and 2022 definitions of those variables. 

For these and other reasons, there was some information available that we decided not to include in the physicalization. This included house number, marital status, relation to the “head of the household,” active time in a profession, rental price, the existence of a living room, as well as specific information on visitors (e.g., period, usual residence) and on absentees (e.g., reasons for absence, duration).

Lastly, we wanted a way to encode two levels of data aggregation: 

• the household, and
• the people living in it.

The separation would allow us to include additional information about the place as a whole, such as the floors on which they lived inside the building, if there was a commercial space, and if they were the owners. Then, at an individual level, we could also encode variables like the gender of the inhabitants, and if they were minors or adults. 

The design and construction

With all these criteria in mind, we organized a student workshop to conceptualize potential designs. The aim of the workshop was to decide on a design and materials that would provide us with a balance between content, practicality, and visual appeal. Besides the analytical possibilities, important factors were the ease of handling the material by children and adults, cost, and the portability of the physicalization. 

After briefly sharing some examples of data physicalization, we started brainstorming ideas that inspired different prototypes using materials such as felt, wood, beads, buttons, cardboard, or pegboards (see Figure 5).

The selected canvases were 3mm thick transparent plexiglass plates with two holes at the top for hanging so they would be visible on both sides. We used colored cardboard, scissors, and glue to encode the data. 

The material’s transparency allowed us to paste on one side a square of a size equivalent to the number of rooms, and on the other side, i.e., “inside each household,” a triangle for each person with personal information. This created a striking visual effect of “crowded” versus “empty” households. The readers could walk around the plates to explore the information on each side. 

The size of the squares was defined by calculating the minimum size of each triangle with all the personal information to be readable in the most occupied household. The result was two plates of 1m² to visualize all households. One side visualized the information about the household (occupation ratio, ownership, use for commercial activity, inhabited floors), and the other side visualized the information about each of the inhabitants of the household (nationality, if employed, profession, gender, adult or minor) (see figures 6 to 8). 

The use of data glyphs allowed us to see many variables in a single view, from which we could discuss different topics with the residents as they noticed new things. It also allowed us to zoom in and out from general topics (e.g., the predominance of nationalities, ownership) to specific details (e.g., professions), and then intuitively look for relationships (e.g., professions in households with lower occupancy ratios, property ownership and inhabited floors). 

We designed the visual vocabulary in such a way that it would trigger questions about nationality, professional occupation, gender, and other issues related to social affluence, and hoped that people’s guesses and solutions would give rise to surprise and intrigue them to learn more about those who lived here 100 years ago.

The final design and construction of the physicalization were finished before the public community workshops. Initially, we had wanted to invite families to reproduce the visualization for their current households – this is one reason why we had also selected easy-to-use materials. But when planning the public events, we realized this was beyond our logistical limitations. However, this exercise could be part of a future event in an educational setting or similar, where we could ensure adequate space and time for the activity. 

The construction of the physicalization was a team effort with highs (e.g., discovering the visual impact of the encoding) and lows (e.g., realizing that there were mistakes that needed to be reworked). We are enormously grateful to the students who participated in this challenging exercise.

The public workshops

To test the physicalization, we organized two workshops with residents. One was in a dedicated cooperative community space, and the second one at a bakery where people could spontaneously join the discussion (see Figure 9), both in the area near Brill Street. 

During the workshops, we learned several interesting things. 

Nationality

For one, we realized that the migration history of Luxembourg was blurred in the participants’ memories. Their perceptions of the predominant nationalities in various migration waves did not match the census data for Brill Street. The blue and purple triangles predominate in the visualization, which led to most people suspecting that at least one of the two colors must represent Portuguese nationals, who in 2022 made up a third of the population of Esch-sur-Alzette. However, at the beginning of the 20th century, there were no Portuguese people on Brill Street at all. Instead, at that time, it was known to the locals as the center of “The Italian Quarter.”

Around the turn of the century, a new boom of the local iron mills and mines attracted a large number of workers and their families from all over Luxembourg (purple in the physicalization) and the bordering regions in Germany, France, and Belgium, but also from Italy (blue in the physicalization) and Austria. While the Luxembourgish and German nationals made up the largest portion of the workforce, Italian miners and construction workers were also needed for the quickly expanding town. But in contrast to other nationalities, Italians favored living in a small selection of streets away from the city center. While nine out of ten Italians arriving in Esch by 1900 were found in Brill Street or one of its adjacent streets, only half of the street’s population consisted of Italians, sharing the street with other newcomers to the city from elsewhere in Luxembourg, Germany, Belgium, and France.

Another topic of discussion was the mix of nationalities in the households. It was very interesting to see how some of the participants projected some generalized opinions, misinterpreting the color coding defined for nationalities, and only realized that they were misconceptions when we mentioned it. For example, when there was a mix of nationalities in the same household, it was more likely to be in a house with Luxembourgers, contrary to the projected belief.

Occupancy

We talked with residents about the temporary workers who traveled alone for short periods, and who were not always present in the census, because they would have left the city before December when the census was conducted. Some residents also mentioned that we should not only talk about a room occupancy ratio but a bed occupancy ratio. They recalled that beds were rented out to multiple people; one would sleep in the bed and work the night shift, and the other would work the day shift and sleep in the bed at night. This practice was kept alive for several decades but became visible in the census data only through vastly overpopulated apartments. 

Patterns of Rental and Ownership 

One neighbor mentioned that their family had been homeowners in the past but had then sold the properties to buy another house in their home country to return to in old age or for their grandchildren to inherit. Yet, even at a very old age, they had remained in the street or adjacent streets of the Brill quarter, renting for generations. This is a behavior quite common among immigrant families who want to keep the connection to their homeland and their relatives and see their stay in Luxembourg only as temporary, even in cases where they had spent most of their lives in Esch-sur-Alzette. 

Another interesting discussion arose when neighbors were talking about the exchange of rental housing within the same building. The houses had two or three floors plus the attic, and some neighbors mentioned that when families grew bigger or children got older, sometimes neighbors exchanged apartments within the same house. We do not know if these changes were recorded in the census.

These and other conversations with the residents of Brill Street and the surrounding streets around the physicalization allowed us to give them back a bit of their neighborhood’s history and more deeply connect the past and the present. 

Lessons learned

If you want to use data physicalization to make a dataset more accessible to your audience, this is what we have learned in the process:

• If you work with historical data, understand the historical context and make it explicit. This is one of the strengths of interdisciplinary work – do not assume that the interpretation of variables and categories is the same over time. Collaborators can help us see the context. 

• There was a leap for us between visualization and physicalization, which included experimenting with structures, materials, and construction. It was an exciting process (especially for those of us who spend the day designing visualizations on the computer), but do not underestimate the complexity of physically building something. Not all materials are easy to handle. For example, we had to learn how to cut and drill Plexiglas, which turned out to be more difficult than we initially anticipated. 

• As with any data visualization where you define a custom visual vocabulary, do not forget the “how to read” section. Luxembourg is a plurilingual country where it is a challenge to organize an event in one single language. Here, our physicalization has an advantage: we could print the instructions about how to read it in English, French, Luxembourgish, and German. The only text in the visualization itself was the professions, which we decided to leave as-is to respect the language of the census form (and translate it upon request during the events).

• If your design is attractive, everyone will want to know what it is—not only during the events, but in between. We stored the physicalization in our office, and in the end, we decided to hang a copy of the “how to read” on the wall, because everyone passing by was curious about what it was. Use that interest to deepen the conversation.

• Take the physicalization to everyday places, where people stay for a while (e.g., markets, stores, waiting rooms), and informally start the dialogue. The physicalization can be used as a tool to initiate an informal conversation about historical data, as it encourages curiosity about visual imagery, rather than to confront people with abstract data. Organized workshops might work best in educational, research, or professional settings.

• When you build something physically, you must plan in detail, because there is no “refresh” key. If you miscalculate the number of repetitions in a category, you run out of materials; if you do not see an outlier in time, you have to recalculate all the space usage. Correcting errors becomes an art, especially when the physicalization is at a very advanced stage. Plan “the construction,” build the small components first if possible, and finally put them all together. That will leave more room for surprises and corrections. 

• During the construction of the physicalization, enjoy the process of discussing the hows and whys, and spend the necessary time going back and forth to the data sources, to better understand the raw data. We found these discussions the most exciting and rewarding part of being on the construction team! By the time you finish the physicalization, you will be true experts in the dataset.

• If you can, experiment with different audiences – even informally! One day, while working on the construction of the physicalization, Aida had a very interesting conversation about the visualization with her 5-year-old daughter, who only needed a couple of minutes to understand the content and start asking questions. This made us think that children could not only participate in building the physicalizations, but also by getting involved in the analysis, asking questions, and participating in the discussion. 

Above all, we encourage you to embrace creative uncertainty – thinkering – in bringing data to life. Engage in discussions with the other experts and with the public, and together you too can explore new insights about history through the physicalization of data.

The post From The Historical Archive To The Citizens: Visualizing Census Data From Brill Street in 1922 appeared first on Nightingale.

But it turns out that isotype charts were prevalent in US government documents in the 1930s and 1940s. If you look for them, you can find isotypes sprinkled all over the US during this time — they just weren’t made by Otto or Marie Neurath. No, the growth and popularity of pictorial statistics in the USA are thanks to a different under-recognized figure in design history: Dr. Rudolf Modley.

Born in Vienna, Rudolf Modley was involved as a student volunteer in the earliest days of Neurath’s Museum of Society and Economy. After years of service, Modley eventually moved to the USA to serve as Neurath’s proxy at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, but had ideas of his own and began designing isotype charts by himself.

A young man on his own in America, Modley’s life then follows the path of many first-generation immigrants — he saw an opportunity and worked hard to take advantage of it. The rise of the New Deal in the early 1930s saw many government agencies looking to pictorial statistics to visually communicate their plans to an eager American population. Of course, the officials in the US government looked to Rudolf Modley’s company conveniently named “Pictorial Statistics, Inc” to do so.

He worked tirelessly to bring pictorial statistics to the common American as a new method to understand the increasingly scientific world around them. It only makes sense that he took this new form of communication to the biggest mass media at the time: newspapers.

“Makes The Reading of Statistical Information A Pleasure”

Modley’s star was on the rise as a result of his work with the US government. A February 1938 issue of The New Yorker indirectly announced Modley’s plans when they wrote: “He and his staff will take on any sort of research of graphs [with] Telefact, a feature which he is preparing for newspaper syndication.”

Later, in his 1952 book Pictographs and Graphs, Modley writes about charting in newspapers: “Another difficulty in charting for newspapers is the speed with which the charts must be prepared. The research and finished artwork must be done in a day or two, which puts tailor-made charts beyond the reach of many newspapers. For this reason, several methods for making timely charts available in syndicated form have been tried. As early as 1937, Telefact, a graphic syndicate, made its appearance. Its charts dealt with general social and economic subjects, and, during World War II, with information pertaining to the war. Designed to be used over a period of time, they were topical without following the latest news as a newspaper would.”

Telefact was syndicated widely across the USA, and featured in newspapers in Minnesota, South Carolina, Virginia, Arizona, Utah, and many others. As you can see on the left, they were inserted wherever space allowed, and visually competed for the reader’s attention with advertisements and headlines.

In his 1938 article “Pictographs Today and Tomorrow”, Modley says: “… another effort has been made to have pictographs penetrate even into remote areas by means of a syndicated newspaper feature called Telefact, which presents a fact of social or economic importance each day… The pictograph technique opens up new possibilities of influencing and shaping public opinion. It makes possible the presentation of factual material in simple terms and to an audience which is much larger than any yet reached by factual information.”

A Treasure Trove of Charts

There are quite a few Isotype practitioners that have been overlooked but Rudolf Modley is the most known among them with a surprisingly large body of work that is very poorly documented.

Imagine my surprise when searching newspapers.com to find not 2–3 mentions of Telefact, but over a thousand. So far I have manually collected more than 480 charts from daily newspapers with double this amount created from 1938–1945.

The scale of the find is what is so surprising. With so many charts to scan through, we see so many design ideas explored by Modley and his staff. Not only can we see how different subjects are presented using this charting method, but we also can see how the design templates of Isotype have been applied to various types of data.

This laboratory of pictorial statistics feels different from most Isotype examples that we know from books and exhibitions. While many Isotypes are part of a broad study or education focus, Telefacts were designed to be immediate and independent. The concepts that are communicated in Telefacts are naturally interesting but independent of any larger story, acting like bite-sized snippets of economic trivia.

This was exactly the point. It is easy to see Modley’s agenda in the marketing of Telefact as well as in the charts themselves. This project was designed to help people learn the facts — but more than that — to help common people leverage the world of science and statistics in their normal lives.

Of course, Modley was also just as interested as exposing them to Pictorial Statistics as well. He writes in his 1937 book How to Use Pictorial Statistics:

“Numerous textbooks on subjects as varied as history, geography, and biology have been extensively illustrated by pictograph technique. While it is thus assured that the coming generation will be used to the method, another effort has been made to have pictographs penetrate even into remote areas by means of a syndicated newspaper feature called Telefact, which presents a fact of social or economic importance each day.”

How To Present Hundreds of Telefacts Charts When We Can Barely Focus On One?

I found myself wondering what to do with all this content. While I find the charts compelling, I also find the act of scanning through them equally interesting. But I kept wondering how I could help other people have a similar experience? Our dwindling attention span is hard to navigate, so I kept asking myself what was the best way to get this work out into the public and allow them to learn more from it?

I decided to create a Tumblr to share my work for a few reasons. First, Tumblr allows for a very intuitive experience where the user can see the charts as a group and also as individuals. Each image is meta tagged, so these charts will now be searchable among the vast quantity of SEO optimized images on Tumblr. But most importantly, these images will now be indexed by Google, so they will be publically available and accessible.

Please check it out: https://modley-telefact-1939-1945.tumblr.com

Looking At A Few Telefact Charts

There’s a lot to love in these charts. Not only do we see the progenitors of the everyday infographic that we see in our newspapers and magazines today, but also a snapshot of what life was like in the late 30s and into the WW2 era. Let’s take a look at a few interesting charts:

Many charts use standard isotype methods to visually display statistics but also reduce them to a more immediate understanding of the content. This chart uses simplified ‘guide pictures’ to indicate the split between farmers and non-farmers. The chart compares the urban and rural incomes with the corresponding number of children in each.

This telefact chart contains very little text but breaks one of Neurath’s main rules by including the numbers along with the pictorial representation of the number. This is a significant divergence from the Isotype practice, but at the same time adds a significant layer of meaning needed to communicate to a general audience. The basic numbers presented are simple and give substance to the charts.

As for the chart, it is interesting to see just how much water there is in an average egg. The ‘waves’ of water are visually interesting as they are used in a sort of horizontal stacked bar-chart, with the solid, non-water segment showing the rest of the percentage. The use of the wave to denote water is an interesting exercise in symbol abstraction, as the quantity of water in a stick of butter does not map to our understanding of an ocean. Somehow it still works.

Of note is that each Telefact has the month and day included in the right corner to show exactly when it was to be published. Unfortunately, they do not include the year.

The ‘unit arrow’ diagram on the left is another isotype chart type popularized by the Neurath’s and was used throughout their careers. It’s clear that Modley regularly kept a close eye on their work and, for better or worse, continued to build on their ideas.

In the chart on the left, each arrow represents the millions of dollars in exports and easily shows exactly where the US sells its goods. In order to squeeze so much information into such a small area, Modley creates a massive simplification of the map shapes in a semi-geometric fashion. Modley experiments with this kind of geometric simplification throughout this period of his work.

Otto and Marie Neurath occasionally used the power of analogy to focus the audience to consider data in a certain way as best used in the chart “Only an Ocean In Between”. In the chart on the upper right, however, Modley uses a similar idea to compare the wind velocity for five major cities as the distance it takes to blow the leaves off a tree. The power of analogy is particularly very strong, and while Modley didn’t use this technique often, it is especially powerful in the right context.

In terms of subject matter, Modley knew salacious subjects would help to attract attention. This chart of fatal accidents — complete with almost 30 little dead guys — used repetition to grab attention and a basic title to seal the deal.

In the end, this is ultimately a conventional pictograph, with little Isotype influence. That’s not inherently a bad thing, as an overview of the hundreds of Telefacts shows a huge quantity of these types of pictographs interspersed between more complex charts and diagrams.

Pictographs are easy to understand and require less visual sophistication by the audience. By using so many basic pictographs it shows a willingness by Modley and his team to focus on the data and not over-do it. Certainly creating these charts each week/day was a huge amount of work, so standardizing the process for creating the charts was just as important as knowing when to move on to the next one.

This map is again very much in the mode of what you’d see created by the Isotype team. The chart’s learning objective is to compare population density with recreational areas. While well-intentioned, it is unfortunately not a very successful chart as it is too crowded and not well labeled.

In collecting so many Telefact charts it also becomes an important opportunity to learn from Modley’s failures. Understanding when a chart is successful, and when it is not, helps us understand how to bring these ideas into our own practice. In the chart above, Modley tried to cram too much into too small an area creating a messy design that is hard to visually read.

I’d invite everyone to interrogate the design of each of these charts for the same purpose of learning what works and what does not.

We can also study these charts to see exactly how Modley’s efforts began to diverge their Isotype origins. Both charts above are quite different from what the Neuraths were designing yet are still sophisticated designs.

The chart on the left, “How Many People One Farmer’s Work Feeds”, speaks about the benefits of modernization and mechanization, the changes in American culture over a century, and hints at the role of agriculture in international trade. On the bottom row, Modley literally draws a blank as to what the future holds. This is a provocation; not a projection into the future, but a dare to the audience to learn more in order to shape it. By crafting a design that focuses on the possibilities, it departs from the normal isotype objective of illustrating the statistical ‘known’.

The “S” design of the chart on the right is typical of some other charts that Modley invented. It was created as a way to display a process happening over time but visually compressed into a small space. Modley uses a similar design in a book called the “New York Primer” which came out the year before, so it is a design concept he was exploring at the time.

Exploring these design concepts is important as it shows that contemporary information designers can (and should!) continue to explore new design patterns based on Isotype to further their communication needs. Rudolf Modley’s team was constantly experimenting, just as his earlier text has said, by “open[ing] up new possibilities of influencing and shaping public opinion.” This also proves that Modley wasn’t “merely” an imitator, but a practitioner on his own merit.

These two Telefacts also show how Modley was experimenting with graphic design concepts as well. The chart to the top left, “Salaries Above $300,000” rides the line between data visualization and design sloganeering. It shows another reoccurring subject of Telefact charts, the breakdown of jobs in Hollywood. The chart’s label assuming a graphic that drives the appeal of the whole design.

“For Every Job 500 Applicants” to the top right shows an entirely different illustration of a 1-out-of-500 statistic. Each dot is a person that is restrained behind a barrier while a solitary silhouette strolls up to the studio entrance. Black is used to grab the audience’s eye while a sort of isometric view provides the compositional structure.

Both of these Telefacts would easily attract attention in a crowded newspaper layout. By studying these works we see other ideas in exploring the aesthetic possibilities in Isotype designs, opening us to the possibilities beyond Neurath, Arntz, and Modley.

The Importance of World War II to Telefact

WWII was extremely important for the Telefact series as quoted by Modley at the beginning of this article. The war provided loads of information that would have been very interesting to Americans. Modley’s Telefact charts were there to explain details of the mechanisms and fighting techniques; feeding a public hungry for news of loved ones serving in the war.

While many Telefacts were still providing pictorial statistics, diagrams helped to decode the complexity of the new technology of war as well as help explain how Americans could contribute in their own ways. Certainly, we see a rise in cross-section diagrams that help explain the components of everything from bombs to bombers, and houses to air-raid shelters. The diagrams spanned a variety of styles, likely created by different artists on Modley’s team.

What’s interesting is that this move to diagrammatic information design occurs before Marrie Neurath’s books for children. It’s interesting to consider that both designers began a more illustrational approach to designing information, rather than just statistics, after the war. While Marie Neurath certainly had much more of a focus on creating charts and illustrations for books after her emigration to England in 1941, the Isotype team had a split focus on exhibition design and institutional education during the 1930s. Otto Neurath’s focus on ‘learning through the eye’ was certainly a reality by the post-war period, with many primary books lavishly illustrated by the time. Perhaps the importance of statistical education took a more general back seat to more qualitative information design as the world refocused on an optimistic future.

The Grunge of News: Aesthetics & Business

I also want to take a moment to celebrate the beauty of the grungy ‘realness’ of newsprint. Cheap paper, bad lithographs, ink slip, punctured and torn paper, and plain old dirt are all present in these reproductions.

The process of creating syndicated news graphics would have been purely physical at the time. Images would have been drawn by hand or reproduced photographically. The text might have been set by hand or optically produced likely about 4x larger than printed. The reproductions would have been mailed weekly to papers around the country allowing each to then prepare for local printing. It is all gloriously messy, made even more so by the digitization process of scanning, adjusting for contrast, and sharpening the rough edges of the not-so-sharp image.

We could also consider the Telefact a kind of “science comic” as the method of creation and distribution would have largely been the same for both. Telefacts were distributed by Science Service, a newspaper syndicate begun by two journalists dedicated to “pioneering the dissemination of accurate, accessible, and engaging news of science to the public primarily through the mainstream media through its syndicate service.” We can easily consider Telefact to be their version of the funny papers.

Modley was sincere in his quest to get pictorial statistics into modern practice, and in 1943 he published his first collection of over 1,000 icons. The book Pictorial Symbols collected his pre-made icons as seen throughout the Telefact series in order to equip those who wanted to make their own charts. Prices for charts, icons, and custom icons were very reasonable, with your custom selection of icons priced at $.05 cents for the first 50 icons, then $.01 cent each after that (50 icons would cost the equivalent of $30 USD today)

Turning the book Pictorial Symbols over reveals a full-page ad for Telefact on the back cover. Nested at the bottom is the announcement of the acquisition of the Telefact series by McClure Newspaper Syndicate, which ultimately spelled the beginning of the end.

McClure Newspaper Syndicate would have been one of the largest companies in the business, distributing 10,000 features with combined sales of $100 million a year. Lasting more than a century in business, McClure was one of the biggest distributors of comics, bringing everything from Rube Goldberg to Batman and Robin to thousands of papers every day. That kind of reach, with those kinds of resources, would have been attractive to Modely. While it is clear that Modley and his team continued their involvement with the series for at least two more years, we see less pictorial statistics and more traditional charts begin to appear in the series in 1945.

For those familiar with Isotype, the chart at the above right, “Expected Cut In War Production Program,” would have literally been the antithesis of Neurath’s teachings. The very invention of the Isotype concept was in opposition to the scaling of icons to show their quantity. It’s clear that by this point Modley was likely not present in the creation of the Telefact series as he would never have supported such a chart. That same chart also illustrates the end of the war, which ended up being a significant complication as well.

The syndication of newspaper content had been booming since the turn of the century, but as the war began its last year, many newspapers cut back their pages to contribute towards war rations. After the war, the rise of televisions provided a new challenge that reduced newspaper sales further. In my research, I could not find any Telefact charts after 1945.

Rudolf Modley continued to work in pictorial statistics for many years afterward. He published a number of books about graphic communication and also collaborated with historians to explain American and European economic history.

Communication With All People Everywhere

As the post-War world embraced multi-national collaboration and standardization, Modley found himself collaborating with celebrity cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead. Their 1968 essay Communication Among All People Everywhere in Natural History Magazine outlines their shared interest in cataloging all manner of icons and methods of visual communication as an emerging Lingua franca.

As Modley had been documenting icons for decades already, another famous designer, Henry Dreyfuss, also sought his assistance in compiling icons for a similar project. In an act of cosmic completeness, in the late 1950s, Modley enlisted Marie Neurath to help collect a wide survey of icons from many industries. The two collaborated for years sending icons and letters discussing their work. Dreyfuss published his Symbol Sourcebook: An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols in 1972 to widespread acclaim. It’s an incredible book, unique in many ways, and includes an introduction by Buckminster Fuller, as well as a 2-page spread introducing Isotype written by Marie Neurath.

Collecting icons must have fulfilled Modley, who continued to work on his own Handbook of Pictorial Symbols right up until his death in 1976. The earlier collection in his Pictorial Symbols book from 1942 was expanded with the help of Gerd Arntz and extended to include over 3,250 wayfinding and Olympic icons. It’s an awesome resource issued by the low-cost Dover Publications (which is still readily available used for under $5).

The book begins with an essay by Modley called “Introduction to Graphic Symbols”. It seems only fitting to finish this essay by noting the reverence he held for Otto Neurath as evidenced in his writing. There it is, right on the first page, “The modern techniques of graphic presentation of facts and figures were developed by Otto Neurath in the early 1920s in Vienna. If you learn these techniques, you too can use graphic symbols to set forth complex facts in simplified, more easily understood and more easily remembered form.”

Modley, at the end of his life, performs the ultimate pivot, from Otto Neurath to you. Practicing this kind of isotype/pictorial statistics was just as possible then as it is today. Rudolf Modley’s mission as pictorial statistics teacher and Neurath evangelist rings true to the very end.

There are so many examples of isotype and pictorial statistics to take inspiration from. What better place to start your learning journey than by scanning through several hundred Telefact charts?

Go find them at: https://modley-telefact-1939-1945.tumblr.com

Thanks as always to: Georges Hattab, Alyssa Bell, and  RJ Andrews for their editorial help and support.

Several of the essays cited in the above article have also been recovered from original sources:

Pictographs Today and Tomorrow, Rudolf Modley, Public Opinion Quarterly, 1938

Communication Among All People Everywhere, Margaret Meade and Rudolf Modley, Nature Magazine, 1968

Handbook of Pictorial Symbols introduction, Rudolf Modley, 1976

The author is especially indebted to the work of Hisayasu Ihara for their pioneering research on Rudolf Modley. If you are interested, I’d urge you to read more:

Rigor and Relevance in the International Picture Language, Rudolf Modley’s Criticism against Otto Neurath and his Activity in the Context of the Rise of the “Americanization of Neurath method”, Hisayasu Ihara, 2009

This article comes as part of a series on Isotype and derives mainly from research on the Isotype design process created by Otto and Marie Neurath with Gerd Arntz. My goal is to teach people about the techniques and mindset of this data-driven design team, in order to inspire new information design concepts today.

The post The Telefacts of Life: Rudolf Modley’s Isotypes in American Newspapers 1938–1945 appeared first on Nightingale.

At the end of the XIX century in Russia, there was an explosive growth in the number and assortment of printed graphics. This was due, first of all, to the development of the domestic printing industry, and secondly, to the emergence and widespread use of color printing technologies. Among them are open letters or postcards.

In Russia, illustrated postcards began to be printed in 1895, and in a short time, they became part of the cultural life of the country. The postcards showed views of cities and landscapes, demonstrated important events that took place in the state and society, printed stories from the life of ordinary people, and portraits of public figures. They reproduced paintings by famous masters, book illustrations for fairy tales, folk splints, etc.

Like the poster, the postcard almost immediately became a carrier of advertising information. During its manufacture, the image was reduced and the font inscriptions were adapted, which was a simple matter. Many enterprises and companies have used this small graphic form to promote goods and services or to strengthen their image.

One of the typical examples is the advertising of the Singer company specializing in sewing equipment which also published art postcards with drawings by famous Russian and European artists. In a series of art postcards entitled “Russian Proverbs in Faces” (1905), scenes from folklife were presented in the manner of a lubok, accompanied by humorous proverbs and the presence of an image of a sewing machine and a trademark of the Singer company.

Another function of the postcard was agitation and propaganda, which was facilitated by socio-political changes in the public life of Russia in the early twentieth century, which turned it into an information platform. “A useful format, a large edition, and the possibility of mass distribution have made the postcard an indispensable means of propaganda and a news information source” [1].

The first examples relate to the period of the Russian-Japanese War of 1904–1905. The variety of the plot allows us to talk about the birth of a new medium for the promotion of ideas, slogans, and appeals. In addition to battle scenes, the military postcards also featured caricature sketches in the spirit of the Russian splint. We will see the continuation of this in Kazimir Malevich and Dmitry Moore in 1914 (Fig. 1). The images of epic heroes were sufficiently presented, such as the postcard “In the Far East”, Nicholas Roerich showed images of Russian warriors and Japanese samurai in traditional national armor. This technique will be widely used in the propaganda graphics of the First World War, by Viktor Vasnetsov or Konstantin Korovin.

The Russian propaganda postcard of the initial period of the First World War became an effective new tool in the arsenal of agitators and propagandists when combined with the debut of visual statistics. But diagrams on postcards appeared earlier in the “Russia in Numbers” series based on the materials of Ivan Ozerov from his “Atlas of Charts on Economic Issues” (1908–1909).

In addition to bar and pie charts, multi-colored postcards also contained figure diagrams based on the proportional change of images depending on the values represented. Colorful images of teapots and coffee pots, ears, and rolls of fabrics showed the average per capita consumption of tea and coffee, wheat yield, and textile production in various countries (Fig. 2–3). The authors of these miniatures were guided by similar diagrams of Adolf Marks as well as the “Universal Geographical and Statistical Pocket Atlas” of the Austrian cartographer Anton Hickmann. The Russian reader could get acquainted with it in four editions (1900, 1903, 1908, 1915).

The beginning of the World War initiated the introduction of visual statistics into the propaganda policy of the state. In 1914, Mamontov’s printing house printed a series of open letters showing proportional ratios of the territory, population and economic potential of the belligerent states (Fig. 4). The black-and-white postcards “Army of the Belligerent Powers”, “Space of the Belligerent Powers”, “Population of the Belligerent Powers”, “Number of Horses of the Belligerent Powers”, “Grain Reserves of the Belligerent Powers” clearly show the absolute advantage of the Russian Empire over the opposing side: Germany and Austria-Hungary. Superiority was demonstrated by the dominant image of a Russian soldier, a horse, a sheaf of wheat, etc.

In fact and in content, similar postcards were produced at the beginning of the war by other publishing houses. For example, the series “The Armed Forces of the Belligerent Powers” was published by the printing house of the partnership “Gramotnost” (“Literacy”) and was printed lithographically in two colors (Fig. 5). It should be noted that pictorial statistics were practically not found in the pre-revolutionary poster. An exception is the advertising poster of Mutual Zemstvo Insurance Company of Kostroma province (1915).

After the October Revolution of 1917, the center of gravity of agitation and propaganda was transferred to the poster, which became the main graphic tool of influence. According to Polonsky, “having received a development that Europe and overseas countries did not know, the revolutionary poster is a picturesque monument, the like of which no epoch has left” [2]. The propaganda postcard of those years was closely adjacent to the poster, was its reduced copy. The plots were devoted to the fateful moments of that era and were based on very specific calls to fight. The slogans of the Civil War in Russia did not require the availability of statistical data supporting the ideological message. Therefore, propaganda isostatistics in posters and postcards of the early 1920s are extremely rare.

Data visualization began to be in demand in the 1920 at the beginning of widespread industrialization. During the industrialization of the USSR, posters of the first five-year plans began to be filled with charts of planned indicators, maps of future construction projects of socialism, diagrams of railways and canals. The propaganda message combined graphics, photographs, photomontage and charts as a visual representation of the facts. Such famous constructivist artists as Gustav Klutsis (photomontage posters), El Lisitsky (exhibition design), Alexander Rodchenko (magazine illustrations) and others worked in this genre. But the postcards, pictorial statistics appear quite independently. This was due to the specifics of this type of printed matter, its accessibility to the general population and the relative cheapness of production. However, the limited format and quality of printing dictated a more compact visual message based only on graphics, and not on photographs or photomontage.

In 1927–1934, the People’s Commissariat of Postal service and Telegraph issued a series of advertising and propaganda postcards (Fig. 6–7). The goal was to make workers widely aware of the achievements of the USSR in the socio-political and economic life of the country, the tasks facing the first five-year plan, and the situation in the world.  These messages were mixed with advertisements of goods and services and the topics were completely different such as the assistance to prisoners of capital and victims of fascism, calls to join the ranks of public organizations such as the Red Cross, and, of course, the slogan “Strengthen the Defense of the Country.” Advertised were toothpaste and powder, Soviet perfumes, a trip along the Volga and the Caucasus from an Intourist, rubber boots and tires, mineral water, and property insurance.

At the same time, in general, the popularity of infographics is increasing, due to the introduction of the Viennese method of pictorial statistics. In 1931, in Lenizogiz, the Department of Fine Statistics published a set of 72 postcards-posters “To Catch up and Surpass the Leading Capitalist Countries in Technical and Economic Affairs in 10 Years.” (Fig. 8). These postcards were mostly original and did not have corresponding posters. But some plots were originally presented in the form of separate large-format charts sheets (37 x 54 sm) — the album with the same name was published in 1931 [3]. They contained statistical data of the first five-year plan (1928–1932) in various areas of the Soviet economy, society and culture.

On most of the postcards, illustrations served as a background for pictorial statistics, made both according to the Vienna method and using domestic original developments such as the method of illustrated film strips by Ivan Ivanitsky.  These postcards were supposed to give an account of the achievements of the country, but “not in dry and boring figures in the form of columns and tables, but in the form of figurative or pictorial charts that could interest every working person of the Soviet Union and a foreign worker” [4]. For this, the text was printed on the back in Russian, English, and German.

The postcards were in demand by the reader. This was facilitated by a successful and accessible format, detailed images and a colorful background. It is no accident that the series withstood a reissue, and in 1934 the next work of Lenizogiz artists was published. It was a series of color postcards dedicated to the second five-year plan (Fig. 9). Compared to previous issues, the charts have become more expressive. They are no longer so suppressed by the background image. The illustrated tapes were replaced with a thin scale axis to improve the composition.

Agitational postcards of the early 1930s became an integral part of the propaganda campaign of socialist construction in the country. The peak of their publication falls at the stage of the formation of infographics as a type of communicative design and the formation of the Soviet propaganda style. At the same time, the isostatistical poster, which was born in Lenizogiz and combined a figure chart and elements of a graphic message, was released in a much smaller range of topics (Fig. 10). Thus, in the early 1930s, we can see the predominance of postcards in Soviet agitation and propaganda, as the most accessible and mass tool for conveying information to the masses. Together with the isostatistical poster, chart albums, and isostatistical exhibitions, they played a role in promoting the formation of a new society.

The post-war postcard turned to pictorial statistics only sporadically. These were poster solutions adapted to a smaller format. The well-known propaganda posters of Nikolai Dolgorukov, Vasily Elkin, Leonid Ushakov containing elements of information graphics were simply duplicated in the small form of open letters (Fig. 10). The series of postcards “Let’s Fulfill and Over-fulfill the New Five-year Plan” released by the publishing house “Sovetskaya Kniga” (“Soviet Book”) in 1946 was formed exactly like this.

The changes concerned font inscriptions, the proportions of symbols, and their location. The color scheme of the work also partially changed. The format of the postcard imposed certain printing restrictions on the resolution of illustrations. Therefore, they became less clear and expressive compared to the original poster images.

Postcards were also issued with a simpler image. On the model of the early 1930s, postcards with calls for the implementation of the new Stalin five-year plan went into the series. On the front side, along with the lined part, there were images of workers and peasants, reinforced with figurative charts on production topics (Fig. 12). Printing was carried out in two colors, for example, crimson with green or red with blue. The reverse side of the card remained free for writing.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the isostatistical postcard lost its relevance in Soviet agitation and propaganda in favor of a more slogan-based approach: “Will Increase Coal Production by 24%”, “Steel Production Growth by 1.2 Times”, “Will Grow 75 Million Heads of Cattle”. These are the appeals that migrated from the materials of party congresses into a poster, brochure, postcard, and postage stamp.

The artist no longer had the task to visualize these changes in comparison with the past by showing the dynamics of progress. As their ideological zeal began to fade, it was only necessary to depict the data as documentation rather than a provocation. The elaborate illustrations faded into the background, such as those seen on the postcards of artist Konstantin Ivanov from the series “Control Indicators of the Development of the National Economy of the USSR for 1959–1965” (Fig. 13) It was published by the publishing house “Sovetskij Hudozhnik” (“Soviet Artist”) in 1959. The dominant numerical data and the background object of its application allow you to do with only two colors: red and black.

A postcard can be considered as a source of information on history and culture. This document of the epoch can become a source for research of a stylistic, artistic, and design nature. Considering such a small graphic form in agitation and propaganda, we can conclude that the elements of infographics begin to be present in the postcard from the beginning of the 20th-century. In comparison with a poster of a similar purpose, the agitational isostatistical postcard became most widespread during the formation of the Soviet propaganda style in infographics in the first half of the 1930s and has been losing its significance since the 1950s.

References

1. Belko T. V., Beschastnov N. P. Evolyuciya «otkrytki» («otkrytogo pis’ma») v Rossii v kontekste istoricheskih sobytij XX v. (Evolution of “postcards” (“open letters”) in Russia in the context of historical events of the 20th century). Bulletin of Slavic Cultures, 2019, vol. 53, pp. 240–257. (in Russ.).

2. Polonsky V. P. Russkij revolyucionnyj plakat (Russian revolutionary poster). Moscow: State Publ., 1925. (in Russ.).

3. Ivanitsky I. P. Izobrazitel’naia statistika i venskii metod (Pictorial Statistics and the Vienna Method). Moscow-Leningrad: OGIZ-IZOGIZ, 1932. (in Russ.).

4. Dognat’ i peregnat’ v tekhniko-ekonomicheskom otnoshenii peredovye kapitalisticheskie strany v 10 let (To catch up and surpass the leading capitalist countries in technical and economic affairs in 10 years).  Ivanitsky I. P., ed. Moscow-Leningrad: OGIZ-IZOGIZ, 1931. (in Russ.).

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In 1929, the US Great Depression emphasized a series of structural weaknesses in the US economy (and social fabric). Herbert Hoover’s ineffectual political response resulted in one of the biggest landslide victories in US politics to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the election of 1932. In Roosevelt’s first 100 days he outlined The New Deal which ultimately took the form of 69 independent agencies (many of which are still in place today) each with their own mission, staff, and budgets.

One of these agencies was the Resettlement Administration, which relocated struggling families to communities planned by the federal government and was headed by Rexford Tugwell. A remarkable man of influence and controversy, Tugwell was an economist, part of Roosevelt’s “brain trust” which helped to engineer the New Deal, and was committed throughout his life to anti-poverty experimentalism in government planning. But American dirty politics being what they are, Tugwell became a target of Congressional opponents of the New Deal, who saw him as a Communist and smeared him with the nickname “Rex the Red”.

But image-making is an important aspect of shaping public opinion and Tugwell was cognisant of his political reputation. He knew that in order to influence American attitudes towards accepting the New Deal, he would need to actually show people suffering from the effects of the Great Depression and then communicate their suffering to the public at large. He would need to give people a reason to care.

To do so, he appointed a former student of his, Roy Stryker, as “Chief of the Historical Section”. Stryker set off to document the Americans trapped in a devastated landscape without opportunity. To do this, he hired photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, and Ben Shahn to find and memorialize images that transcended their subject matter with artistic compositions and emotional appeal. To say the highly influential program was a success is an understatement. Many of these documentary photographs went on to become famous across the world and are now considered among the most important photographs in history.

The success of this project helped “the Historical Section” to be restructured into the new, larger Farm Securities Administration (FSA) in 1937. While the FSA was one of the smaller agencies, it provided many other Works Projects Administration (WPA) agencies with visual support throughout the period.

From documentary image to exhibition spectacle

Stryker’s leadership and ability to craft a marketing campaign was more than just a job, it was an act of idea evangelism. Photography was only one aspect of the work of the Historical Section and all types of designers and craftspeople were also employed for the common cause.

As Jennifer Stoots points out in her essay All things to all people: The aestheticization and commodification of Farm Security Administration documentary photographs, “The photographers working for Stryker were directed to photograph specific people, families and areas that would benefit from New Deal programs; they were to create photographic documents for government use… By 1936, and in addition to print materials, ads and images for press, the Resettlement Administration also organized major educational exhibits. These shows included oversized photo murals, photo collages and large text inserts.”

One of these exhibitions was in San Diego, created for the California Pacific International Exposition in May 1936 — as seen in the photograph at the top of this article. The exhibit was so physically large that no single photograph exists, so I have collaged additional images below to show the full scope of the exhibit:

San Diego was a perfect place for such an educational exhibit organized to support Southern California’s slowing economy. Crowds swarmed the Expo to view exhibits on history, the arts, industry, and science. But the Expo also provided some unusual displays such as a kitschy gold mine in Gold Gulch, an early robot called “The One Ton Mechanical Man” and the purely exploitive “Zoro Garden Nudist Colony”.

The connection to the New Deal also extended to the new buildings themselves, as the Expo was built in part by relief workers from the WPA. Roosevelt himself came to San Diego to seal the deal, delivering a stirring speech to vouch for New Deal programs. He addressed a crowd of 60,000 people inside and 15,000 outside the nearby San Diego Stadium, speaking about “the products of American artistic and mechanical genius” and “of what the nation can achieve on a broad scale.” It was a huge success with 7,220,000 visitors during its 377 days of operation.

Problem & progress: applying pictorial statistics for education

The New Deal era was as politically complex as any other moment in history. The confluence of social, technological, aesthetic, and political factors created a unique playground for artists, designers, and scientists to explore visual and ideological conventions.

Among the influx of ideas was Otto Neurath’s Isotype, which began to blow over from Vienna in the early 1930s, and featured most prominently in the socialist-leaning periodical Survey Graphic. The subject of a feature article called “Social Showman” published a few months after the exposition opens, Neurath’s theories are neatly outlined for the American audience, including this section on communication ideals: “To be sure, Neurath respects and draws upon advertising and propaganda experience. But the product he has to sell is enlightenment. Hence his charts, as was his museum, are not composed of competing parts, or messages, but aim toward visual cooperation.”

It might come as no surprise that flanking the larger photographic mural at the Resettlement Administration exhibit are two walls of hand-painted pictorial statistics. While these are not true Isotype charts, they both show a heavy Neurath influence in the design and ideology.

Pictorial statistics were steadily creeping into New Deal publications as well as an urgency to communicate using the language of advertising. Dori Griffin’s essay in Communication Design, Posters for public health: WPA posters and national dialogues about health care in the United States elaborates: “The relative age of the issuing agency influenced how likely that agency was to engage with visual messaging in a broad public context. Thus the WPA, as a young government agency, enthusiastically embraced public media campaigns. Where and how the posters appeared was a topic that received attention, as well. Professional journals advised public health officials as to which messages belonged in which locations. In general, posters were distributed primarily to [neighborhood] residents, but also to doctors and dentists, and to schools, welfare and health agencies, stores, industrial plants, banks, motion picture theaters, clubs, and restaurants.”

The flat, graphic style of Isotype also lent itself readily to the method of poster printing and design. Griffin notes “The use of Isotype-style icons and illustrations was generally hailed as an aesthetic advancement for government-sponsored design. Isotype-style posters received favorable reviews because of their graphic simplicity, their ability to intuitively communicate factual information and relationships, and their assumed (though, of course, not actual) universality.”

Griffin continues, “‘Under the Federal Emergency Relief Administration the Neurath pictograph technique [i.e., Isotype] was introduced in chart-making, and the Works Progress Administration is now carrying on that work,’ wrote the Assistant Director of Information for the Resettlement Administration, a short-lived New Deal agency, in 1937. However, he concluded that despite these advances, ‘[g]overnment poster work in many respects is inadequate and unimaginative and it is only in recent years that layout and design have made any measurable typographic advance,’ pointing toward the work of WPA poster artist Lester Beall as an exemplar of ‘excellent poster work.’”

LEFT: “Doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief agree…these books are too good to miss!” Federal Art Project 1936 | RIGHT: “Occupations related to industrial arts” by Blanche L. Anish, 1936

A closer look at the Resettlement Administration exhibit at the San Diego Exposition

Exploring the details of the exhibit design reveals some interesting norms both in the creation of pictorial statistics, but also in information design at the time.

The panel on the left side, which explores the statistical problems that the exhibit was trying to rectify, is the more pictogram focused of the two walls. Looking closer, it appears that it was painted in long strips, then tacked onto the wall. While the painting is flat and very consistent, the shading on the trees and the dots on the wife’s dress shows the hand of the unknown artist.

The design of the individual icons on the panel follows a sort of flat, modernist aesthetic. The organization of the pictograms is arranged from largest to smallest as the viewer scans down the wall from 10 units at the top to three units at the bottom.

Interestingly, the argument is focused on the minority unit of each pictogram, such as “one out of three homes in the US is below the standard.” On the far left, we see a foreclosed farm, a family at the relief bureau, and a dilapidated house, all situated in huge proportions to the total US. While the people show no emotion, they are highlighted by darker colors.

But this is just the introduction of a persuasive argument posed by the exhibit. By framing the problem (in this case literally in the title “Resettlement’s Problem” at the top of the wall) by using Isotype charts is a compelling way to orient the audience to the scale of the situation. This then naturally flows into the main section of the exhibit to further explain with high impact graphics and mural-sized photographs.

It only makes sense that the last portion of the exhibit, on the right, shows the potential results of this public investment through a series of charming hand-painted illustrations. These qualitative designs focus on the outcomes of government intervention. These designs are not isotypes at all, but rather icons situated in idealistic environments portraying the assumed outcome. These numbers are not statistics — they are goals.

The top panel shows the resplendent future that results in transforming unsuitable farmland into grazing land or even converting to parks. It’s a sort of Shangri-La for cows facing to the left.

The second panel pictures serene homesteads with abundant fields of wheat. The amber waves of grain flow to the right.

Half-a-million farm families are kept off the dole because of responsible farming practices or strategic interventions by the government. Notice the idealized pre-nuclear family leaning to the left again.

At the bottom, we see the biggest promise of all. Our wavering composition is resolved in a stable, prosperous landscape of houses and farms across a flat horizon. Clouds and mountains dance in the background.

Homeownership was far from omnipresent in 1936. Due to the depression, 25% of all mortgages were in default, which ultimately bottomed out in 1940 with only 44% of all Americans owning their homes — the lowest point in the 20th century. Homeownership is the actual outcome of the American dream—the anthesis of the plundered, weak landscape, and defeated population of the photographs to the left.

Leaving the audience with the promise of owning their own home if they cooperated with the Resettlement Administration would have been extremely enticing. It was all an act of idea evangelism.

Why would novelty matter?

As I started exploring this exhibit I started considering the concept of novelty. What’s the difference between using an Isotype versus a bunch of bar charts? Why would the designers create this on such a massive scale? While answers can be found in the information design of the overall exhibit (and those goals would be likely tied back to the highest-level communication needs of Roy Stryker and the Historical Section outlined at the beginning of the article) the ultimate answer is to try to make something that connects to people. To make something novel.

The definition of novelty is “the quality of being new, original, or unusual”. One can consider many of the greatest works of dataviz as being inherently novel, not only in their ability to give shape to data in a new form but also to capture the imagination of their audience. Because of their novelty, these unique data visualizations stand out, they look different; maybe even challenging the audience to explore the design more like a “game” to find the insight lurking within.

Isotypes create a special bond with your audience by replacing “hard numbers” with icons that your audience can identify with more easily. Isotype charts are suitable for communicating abstract ideas as well as quantitative facts equally. The charts in the exposition communicate abstract ideas (1-out-of-3 homes is sub-standard) and quantitative facts (Homes are being built for 100,000 people).

Certainly, the scale of this exhibit would also be novel. Creating any chart (or photograph, or text) on this kind of scale would separate it from our normal expectations and set it apart — and that is exactly the point. In an International Exposition such as this, with millions of viewers and a crushing amount of distracting content, novelty is ultimately the deciding factor to set apart an exhibit in the memory of the audience.

The post The Influence of Isotype in New Deal Information Design: A Resettlement Administration Exhibition, 1936 appeared first on Nightingale.

Walking and birdwatching is normally my way of relaxing, getting away from the laptop and clearing my mind. It is also my way of getting creative. Coming up with ideas and solutions for projects that I may be working on or for potential new graphics.

Looking through some of the books produced in the 60s and 70s, I came across some fantastic black and white hand-drawn graphics in the ‘New Naturalist’ series I have ranging from birds to moths to hedges. Each book contains a single subject and hence the scope of the graphics is limited to that. However, you can see that the expert in each case is really trying to share their knowledge with the reader in a visual and understandable way.The graphics range from simple small multiple distribution maps of the UK’s birds of prey (as seen above) to line charts showing egg thickness changes due to pesticide use. More complex graphics range from network charts through to illustrative drawings (anatomy of a dragonfly nymph — the stage of a dragonfly and damselfly that lives underwater).

Flicking through ‘Dragonfly’, a complex looking graphic stands out showing the activity pattern of a male dragonfly. It’s striking because of its shape. It looks like a pyramid drawn within concentric circles. An assortment of wavy lines and dots complete the graphic. Because of the complexity, the author has captioned the graphic with detailed ‘how to read the graphic’ text (something we should all think about when producing new, innovative or complex graphics).

When you take a closer look it’s actually a complex data visualisation based on a 24-hour clock. Showing time, position (is the dragonfly near water or away from water), activity (is it perched, cleaning or hunting) and reproductive behaviour (mating or fighting) all portrayed within the graphic. Very smart, and once you have read the caption, very clear! The more I look at this the more I admire it! All this is hand-drawn and only using black and white line work with various types of iconographic shapes.

Another from the series of books looks like a square pie or treemap type of graphic with pie charts overlaid! Sounds bad but have a look. Again it comes with a good graphic explanation. It is based on a 4-acre square field surrounded by hedges. The pie charts show the placements of traps used to catch field mice and bank voles at various times in the year. You can clearly see that, whatever time of the year, the mice can be caught everywhere, whereas the bank voles kept primarily to the hedges (edges). A clear, simple, useful black and white graphic.

In both of these examples, if done today, I would suggest a good headline and explanatory sub-text would be a useful addition, rather than the accepted caption at the bottom (something that scientific papers still need to think about). Narrative text plus pointers to areas of the graphic, but really, I think these are fantastic visuals that get the point across to the reader really well. Simple and effective. Paring back the graphic to what is needed without distraction…obviously helped by the use of only black and white and shading.

There are many more examples across the books that show the creativity needed using just back and white. You can see a couple below, all simply explaining with minimal distractions.

Inspiration and creativity can come from anywhere in life. It’s not just about looking at what is being produced now looking back at what was being produced last year, or 10 years ago (see my blog looking back at what I was producing 10 years ago http://nigelhawtin.com/10-years-ago) or even further back is so important. There have always been constraints, whether that was having to hand-draw things, lack of colour, knowledge or time.

For me, creativity and inspiration can come from the peace and solitude of walking in the countryside at 5am taking in all this world has to offer, looking through old books and magazines, traveling or finding something online that takes my interest.Look up, look down, look to the future, but don’t forget to look to the past as well — inspiration is all around us.

The post Finding Inspiring Data Visualisations In Mid-century Nature Books appeared first on Nightingale.

First of all, let’s look at a few examples from Wikipedia above to be clear what we mean by Political System Chart. We’ve all probably seen these types of diagrams once or twice.

But when talking about ‘Political Systems Charts’ (PSCs) it’s important to understand what they are and what they are not. They are not organisation charts. While they do contain information on hierarchical relationships, they are not, for example, a representation of the administrative divisions of the state. (Perhaps confusingly, some early examples do include elements of organisation charts.)

What PSCs show instead is the way the main powers of the state (legislative, executive, and at times the judiciary) interact with each other and what their relationship is with the electorate (i.e. the source of their legitimacy). In this respect, we can already see where these diagrams come from, as a typology.

Current political system charts are both aesthetically similar to flowcharts and substantially related. Much like flowcharts, PSCs depict both the flow of a process (political sovereignty) and the controls over said process (who makes decisions on which element). Flowcharts seem to have appeared in the 1920s and 1930s. While they probably influenced the aesthetic development of modern PSCs, the earliest example of a political system chart I could identify was actually from six decades earlier, though its aesthetics were quite dissimilar to today’s examples, integrating lots of allegorical and pictorial elements.

USA — 1862

The earliest occurrence I could find is N. Mendal Shafer’s “Diagram of the US Federal Government and American Union” published in 1862.

As we can see in subsequent early examples, this example contains within it both a political system part (showing political institutions and voting) and an administrative part (detailing the principal administrative divisions of the Union — i.e. its states).

A detail that I’ve noticed even in more recent American charts (such as the one below), is the tendency to depict the Constitution (rather than the electorate itself) as the element from which all political power emanates.

Soviet Union — 1925

These two examples from 1925 Soviet Russia, one created in the city Saratov (above), the second one in Tomsk (below), attempt to visually explain the recently approved 1924 Soviet Constitution. The first example inserts the chart in the middle of the constitutional text, to offer a schematic explanation of the text in front of one’s eyes.

In these two charts we see two fundamental changes towards contemporary PSCs:

1. The charts became more abstract, shedding the more figurative elements. Different institutions are shown with different geometric shapes (circles, rectangles, triangles, stars, etc) and the use of multiple linetypes (either of different colors or of different styles, such as continuous vs. dashed) to show relationships.

In contrast with the US example from six decades prior, the visual vocabulary here is clearly modernist, as this is the heyday of the Russian avant-garde.

2. The “administrative elements” become secondary or disappear entirely. While both show the political system and the administrative subdivision of the state, we already see in the one to our left that the administrative system is given a secondary role.As a personal note I appreciate the way in which the first graph takes center stage, right in the middle of the text of the constitution which it tries to visualy reflect.

Neurath — 1946, 1953

These first two pairs appeared in the book entitles “ America and Britain: Three Volumes in One” — “Our two democracies at work”, by K.B. Smellie.

These are PSCs in the purest sense, made in the unmistakeable Isotype style. Especially pages 5 & 6 above do a great job at distilling the ways in which the British and the American governments are elected and function in the context of their respective states.

The sketch below comes from the context of British decolonization of Nigeria and the constitutional discussions taking place in London with the premier of the Western Region of Nigeria, Obafemi Awolowo. The full story (link below the photo) is worth a read.

The Penguin Atlas of World History — 1964, 1974 (Austria-Hungary)

This pleasing marriage of map and chart seems to be from the 1974 Penguin Atlas of World History, itself a translation from the German original “Atlas zur Weltgeschichte” published ten years prior by Hermann Kinder and illustrated by Werner Hilgemann.

Anyone familiar with Austro-Hungarian history and the strange constitutional setup of the empire has to wonder how come charts like the one above haven’t been made earlier. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was a union of two countries, each with its own political setup, only linked at the very top by the institution of the monarchy, and a common foreign, military and financial policy.

Examples in the contemporary press — 21st c. 

Variations of these charts seem to make an appearance in the mainstream press when there are significant political developments in countries with unfamiliar constitutional setups.

The examples below are from the 2009 Iranian elections (BBC), the 2012 election of Xi Jinpingto power (The Economist) and the 2013 German Federal elections (IDE/La Croix)

While Political Systems Charts are not an uncommon visualization, when doing research for my personal blog, I’ve discovered that there is little information on the genesis and evolution of this quite interesting chart form. It would be lovely to learn more about this chart type, and see more historical examples.

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As a data visualization professional with more than a decade in enterprise-scale product design, I can say that this book is nothing short of a revelation. Data Feminism confronts many tenets of how we collect, store, and manipulate data. The book challenges how our teams are organized and who creates the analysis; it makes us take pause at who makes decisions as a result of this work.

Data Feminism is a surprisingly light book, one told with generosity and humor. While it discusses some difficult subjects, it takes a human look at the forces that created them, and the humanity it will take to resolve them. It’s an easy read and one that has already caused me to adjust certain behaviors and take action. I believe it will be a watershed work that will help alter the trajectory of data science as a whole. I’m so pleased to have spoken to Catherine earlier in the month to discuss all of this.

Jason Forrest: First of all, maybe you can quickly introduce yourself, and then because Data Feminism hasn’t been officially published yet, maybe you could introduce the book?

Catherine D’Ignazio: Hi, I’m Catherine D’Ignazio. I’m a new assistant professor of urban science and planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where I’m in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning.

In relation to where the book Data Feminism came from, my own background is in software development; I was actually a freelance software programmer for 15 years. That’s how I paid the bills while I was an independent artist and designer — things that were much less lucrative. In many projects, I wove in a kind of social justice and a long history of being associated with counter cartography and critical cartography works.

When I went back to school at MIT in 2012 at the Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media lab there was all this hype around “Big Data.” One of the things that was really striking to me was just how “modernist” the discourse around data was. There was this kind of assumption on the part of a lot of people that the data was a one-to-one representation of reality. They would look at all the cool correlations, taking these raw inputs and translating them with magic into other outputs. I was like, “Oh wow these folks need to read some Donna Haraway. They need to talk to some of the critical cartographers, folks that have been challenging map-making.”

I was going to this forum organized by my friend Mushon Zer-Aviv that was about responsible data and visualization. And so Mushon was like, “Oh you should really write something that we could discuss at the Responsible Data Form,” so I wrote a very short blog post which was called What would feminist data visualization look like?

I was thinking: “What would we mean by that? What are some of the things that we would have to shift in order to make data visualization feminist,” and to my surprise, it kind of went viral in my community.

One of the librarians at MIT put me in touch with Lauren Klein, who had just given a lecture at Northeastern, in Boston. She had written this whole blog post about what feminist data visualization looks like from a historical perspective, even though they haven’t been canonized in official histories of data visualization. We met in person and really liked each other’s different approaches.

We wrote a short paper, “Feminist Data Visualization” for the IEEE Vis conference, then realized we can’t think about just feminist data visualization — because the visualization part comes at the end. You can’t make feminist data visualization if all the stuff that came earlier in the process was accomplished in some oppressive or terrible way that was reinforcing existing power structures. So that’s kind of where the impetus for Data Feminism came about.

We took that initial work about the communication side of data and backed up to look at the issues of power and inequality that affect the whole data science process. How do we point some of those out and showcase work where people are already doing feminist data visualization or feminist data science, even though they might not consider themselves as such?

But often I think when people see or read that work they are like, “Okay, everything’s broken. What do I do?” So we’re trying to be a little bit more productive — especially for folks who are practitioners. We’re thinking: “What do we do about this? What do we do with this information and our technologies and algorithms and models and other things that are flawed? How do we move forward?”

JF: You describe Data Feminism as “a book about power and data science.” Can you unpack those terms and who you think data feminism is specifically for and why it’s particularly important right now?

CD: When we say power, what we really mean is oppression, like oppressive power structures. Another way to say that would be inequality and where that comes about. I should also explain what definition of feminism we are using in the book. Feminists don’t all agree with each other, there are many different histories of feminism and that’s why I think it is important to be specific. And so, we are very much drawing from Black Feminism, which is a tradition that originated in the US with Kimberle Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins, and the Combahee River Collective.

One of their main assertions, which has come out of the past 40 years or so, is that we can’t only think about gender inequality. We also have to think about all the other sorts of oppressive forces that are at work in the world. We have to think about racism, classism, and all the structural inequalities. (They might look a little bit different in different countries and different cultures, but they exist.) What it means is that some people are systematically privileged and other people are systemically disadvantaged and marginalized. So while almost everything we discuss has a gender lens to it, we try to talk about the intersection of gender and race, or gender and class, and so on.

We try to ask questions like: How do these structural inequalities permeate the data science process? How did they infect every stage of the pipeline? What kind of questions even get asked? Right on down to what kinds of colors you choose to represent different things in your chart. So that’s kind of the intentionally broad focus on power while still being focused on gender throughout, but like, power writ large.

JF: So considering how many “isms” and how serious a lot of the work is, I was really struck by how you’ve told the story of Data Feminism in a relaxed and fun way. It’s an easy read and engaging. I found myself laughing a few times. How did you come to develop this style of writing for this book?

CD: In some ways it came naturally to us, and at other times we’ve wrestled with it because the subject matter is very serious. We tried to balance some of the lightness with some of the seriousness. There are some places where we have to talk about things that are very violent, or very unfair, or just very terrible — and those are places where we do not inject that kind of tone.

But at the same time, we were striving for an approachable introduction for folks who are new to data or folks who are new to feminism. For a lot of people in technical communities, like programmers or academically trained designers, feminism is not something they were exposed to in their education. Introducing those ideas in a way that is approachable and friendly for newcomers was one of the goals, and demonstrating their applicability to more technical concerns.

At least one of my goals as an educator is that I try to meet people where they are. In a lot of cases in my learning trajectory, especially along the lines of things like racial equity, people have given me grace and generosity to not know all the answers, and to point out to me where I’m doing things wrong. We’re all at different stages of learning in that sense, so we try to meet people where they are and offer them some useful concepts.

JF: One of the things I wondered is if you had an idea about whether data itself can be objectively good or bad.

CD: No, no. No, I really don’t think so. I mean, I don’t think it’s necessarily good or bad. I guess the context is everything — like who is using it, how they’re using it, for whose benefit, with whose values and principles in mind. I think that’s the way it matters the most deeply.

Humm. I don’t quite mean that either, because actually, we have developed a very specific set of technologies and methods — I’m thinking, like, inferential statistics or something — as a kind of body of knowledge, which you could make an argument for being objectively terrible. If you look at the history of statistics, it’s tied in with eugenics and racism and all these things. So we inherit these histories.

For example, think about maps. Maps come about because of, basically, European nation-states trying to dominate and exploit the world and commit genocide. That’s our history of maps that we inherit. That doesn’t mean that those tools and technologies can not be re-engineered for other kinds of purposes. While we inherit a very flawed history when we use these flawed tools, that doesn’t mean that we can’t take steps towards justice or more emancipatory uses of those same tools.

JF: Now that I know that Data Feminism actually started by exploring feminist data visualization, why do you think that the visual display of information is so important?

CD: Because the communications interface is the part that actually goes out into the world. Right? The visualization is like the ambassador for the knowledge generated in the data science project. It’s going to be seen by many more people. Probably those people will not have the same level of expertise that whoever did the study has, and so in that sense, I’ve always been really interested in visualization and maps as communication objects. What world does this particular visualization or map portray? I see the communication of data as being extremely important — the first stepping stone into the subject matter for that future audience.

To go back to the “who’s it for” question for Data Feminism, we really saw this as borrowing from bell hooks where she says “feminism is for everybody.” So we say “data feminism is also for everybody.” It’s for men, it’s for people of all genders — it’s not only for women. To be more specific, we think about it as a book for those newcomers to either data or feminism, who might be coming from the more technical side. So it might be computer scientists or data scientists or statisticians, or it might be for folks in women and gender studies or folks in the humanities, like designers, journalists, librarians — what I would call public information fields — which are just so crucial and important right now.

I’ve been disappointed because a lot of the conversations going on around data ethics in the establishment recently are a lot of these new ‘centers for data ethics,’ located in a computer science department at a university. I find that very depressing. Because if we’re going to solve these issues on the implications of data in society for democratic outcomes, then the computer scientists are not the ones who are going to solve it. They have some great methods, but we need a lot of different people at the table. Let’s include all the people that I just mentioned, the friends from the humanities and social sciences, who have this wealth of information that can contribute to these conversations.

We’re trying to bring together all these different folks. Or at least, make a book that is accessible to all those different folks, to show some of these ideas originated in the humanities — because feminism largely comes out of humanities, and social science ideas, and thinking around inequality. These ideas have relevance for technical disciplines.

JF: I’d love to talk about the data-ink ratio. You have a different conception of it than many data visualization practitioners, so could you explain your take on it?

CD: Sure. Like I said earlier when I referred to the dialogue around visualization as modernist, that’s how I find the data-ink ratio from Tufte. This idea that we should devote the least amount of ink possible to any kind of decoration and embellishment of the data visualization. Like, it should be about the data and nothing more than the data — anything else is a distraction. To be a strict modernist, there’s a minimalism movement to strip down painting to the basic elements. Everything else is banished.

I think it’s dangerous as designers when we draw these hard and fast lines. We’re not the first to criticize the data-ink ratio, as there have been folks from the art spaces who have looked at maximalist data visualization. Or as Kelly Dobson says: data visceralization; work that’s for all of the senses of your body, not just your eyes. Then there are folks from the scientific and technical visualization community who have demonstrated empirical studies. Again, it’s context-dependent, but in many cases, it doesn’t make sense to follow the super minimalist approach if what you care about are the basic things, like people remembering the graphic or people recognizing what it’s about.

So why is that? There’s a great paper by Scott Bateman and others, that shows a great example by Nigel Holmes with a monster. Edward Tufte criticizes this as a terrible distortion of things, but actually in a lot of ways it makes sense if you’re thinking with your designer or artist hat. Because if we use things like novelty and attention-grabbing tactics, they are the emotional aspects of communication that Tufte would banish. We actually see these are really good for recognition, learning, and remembering. Plus it’s just more fun!

So that would be our pushback — not to say “don’t ever do a minimalist data visualization” — but that we need to be careful when we establish these hard and fast rules. Often what we’re doing is establishing unspoken hierarchies where we’re saying ‘only reason shall enter here and emotion, you shall be banished.’

JF: Your book is filled with ideas such as anti-oppressive design, co-liberation, and a general reevaluation of bias detection in data science. Do you have any recommendations on how individuals of larger organizations can begin to operationalize these kinds of concepts into work at scale?

CD: That’s such a great question. One of the things I firmly believe is that you can ‘do feminism’ from wherever you are and whatever level of power that you have. You can practice feminism from that standpoint, so we don’t have to wait until like, racism has been dismantled before we begin.

I like the “think local” thing: to focus on what’s in your particular purview that you can change, even if you don’t have direct control over them. If you’re in a corporation, you can escalate things up the chain, you can organize people where you can do things differently. Doing a scan of the environment and thinking “what are the ways that sexism and racism enter into our work?” and “how would we re-imagine doing our work differently?” A lot of those are things that are not easy — making a change in any way is never easy — but it’s within your power to make them.

Depending on where folks are, they might not have complete control, but they might be able to change the composition of work teams, they might be able to influence hiring practices, they might be able to get a seat at the table at higher-level discussions about how things should be working.

We try to point out the ways we can make changes which we might not think of as being related, such as the identities of the people making something. It’s not an accident that we’re making a bunch of racist and sexist AI products right now because it is primarily dominant groups with little gender and racial literacy who are doing the work. We don’t catch these things because nobody on the team is looking for them, because those people are not the people who have the power. So all the identities of the people who are doing the work matter.

All of these kinds of policies for work and well-being making, its helpful and at least makes it as comfortable as possible for women and people of color and low-income people to be in the work environment. All of those things actually really matter. You might think that’s separate, that’s somebody else’s job — no that’s all of our jobs.

I always say this one is hard, but pushing back against your own privilege is important. We described in the book “the privilege hazard,” that sometimes we cannot see the privilege that we have. Me, for example, I don’t experience racism and so I am not as sensitive as I could be to the times when racism has permeated my environment. That fact also gives me fewer skills to speak out when it does.

It’s worth thinking about what the lines of difference are and how can I be a good ally or accomplice. Like, how do I be a good ally or accomplice to the women in my working environment? How do I be a good ally or accomplice to the people of color or disabled folks in my environment?

So thinking across those lines that are tied up with this idea of co-liberation: that none of us are free if some of us are not.

Thank you so much to Catherine for taking the time to speak with us!

I wholeheartedly suggest you go take a read through the draft version of Data Feminism! It’s an amazing book:

https://bookbook.pubpub.org/pub/dgv16l22?readingCollection=09555901

Lastly, here is Catherine’s whole presentation “Feminist Data, Feminist Futures” at EYEO Festival, 2019:

The post None Of Us Are Free If Some Of Us Are Not: Catherine D’Ignazio on Data Feminism appeared first on Nightingale.

While Du Bois’s legacy is cemented in American history, his data visualization remains relatively unknown. I’m passionate about Du Bois’s story and have been discussing it via a series of articles through the lens of a UX Designer working in data visualization. My hope is that these posts inspire more academics, designers, and data visualization specialists to explore this work further in order to place the work into the proper historical significance.

The word “Negro” will appear frequently in this series. It’s not a word I take lightly. It is the term Du Bois references throughout this phase of his career and I think it’s best to honor and contextualize his use of language for this article.

Understanding the sequence of the charts

There are sixty-three of Du Bois’s charts from “The Exhibit of American Negroes” in the collection of the Library of Congress and there are a number of reasons why understanding the sequence of the charts is important. If we learn the order that each chart was created, it would help us to understand why Du Bois developed the unique forms and methods that underlie the entire series. Then, by considering the order in which Du Bois displayed these works to the viewer, we can understand how he communicated his complex data story.

Even with the publishing of the new book “W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America,” which seeks to tell the story of the exhibit and briefly touches on the individual charts, this body of work remains under-researched. Since there is little historical documentation, not much is known about how the charts were created and the exact sequence of the charts will probably never be known.

We know that the charts were created in less than four months, and we know that after the Paris Exposition, the exhibit was displayed in Buffalo, NY, and Charleston, SC. Since the exhibit was created in collaboration with Daniel Murray, assistant librarian at the Library of Congress, Du Bois had known the works would eventually be part of their collection. In my correspondence with the Library of Congress (LoC), they assumed that the order of the charts was likely established by Murray himself, which does lend the sequence quite a bit of credence.

As I’ve written in previous posts, Du Bois set off on a 10-year study of “The Negro Problem” which began with the publishing of “The Philadelphia Negro” in 1899. Encouraged by the positive reaction, he immediately continued his research in both Virginia and Georgia.

Du Bois was already planning to craft a high-level overview as part of his larger body of research. So when “The Exhibit of American Negroes” was organized at the end of 1899, Du Bois naturally took the opportunity to use the exposition to expand the scope of his sociological work. As a result, he then organized the statistical charts to explore data on three levels: international, national, and local.

The charts themselves are split into two groups: “The Georgia Negro” which focuses on the “typical” state of Georgia, which had the second-largest African-American population at the time (Virginia was the largest), and the highest Negro to White ratio. It contains charts #1–36.

The other section is called “A Series of Statistical Charts Illustrating the Condition of the Descendants of Former African Slaves Now in Residence in the United States of America”, which focuses on the national and international view of the data. It contains charts #37–63.

Doubts about the sequence of the charts

As discussed in my last article, the chart “Income and Expenditure of 150 Negro Families in Atlanta GA, USA,” which is #31 in the LoC sequence, is actually displayed on the top of a stack of the charts and acts as a “key” to the larger exhibition. It is shown in conjunction with the two “title” charts for each series – but I’ve always thought it was odd that the 31st work in the series was shown as the key to understanding the rest of the works.

Another aspect of the sequence that has perplexed me is how the works are titled. For most of the second series, the titles are printed and pasted onto the card while the first series labels are all hand-lettered. This is important because it suggests that the second series would have been done first in order to get the titles confirmed in time for the printing. Of course, on further examination of the second series, that’s not entirely true as 8 of the 27 works are hand-titled. Then, if we consider the time it took to conduct the research for “The Georgia Negro” and then hand-draw the thirty-five 24″ x 27″ charts in that series, it seems likely that this group of charts would have to be crafted after the other series.

I propose that the two series were actually created in the opposite order. I believe Du Bois and his students crafted the second series while the research was being conducted for The Georgia Negro. Then, after both series were created, Du Bois added additional hand-titled works to the second series in an effort to complete the storyline in both series. I believe the “key chart” (“Income and Expenditure of 150 Negro Families in Atlanta GA, USA”) was actually among the last of the charts created, as it seems to situate the statistical charts to the larger exhibit.

Below is an image of all the charts in the two sequences. Looking at the entire sequence in this way shows how visually different the two series are, and also displays how innovative the charts are across both series.

The mystery of William Andrew Rogers

Yet another mystery is the relationship between the creation of the work and a graduate student named William Andrew Rogers.

Listed on the official Atlanta University record (above) as a non-resident graduate student residing in Virginia, Rogers was first rediscovered by Shawn Michelle Smith in her amazing book Photography on the Color Line. In an article from the Atlanta Journal from 1900, Rogers is cited as “drawing and coloring” all the charts, but the documentation for the newspaper article has been elusive and my continued attempts to learn more about Rogers have been fruitless.

While it certainly makes sense that a single student oversaw the organization and drafting of the charts, there is not currently any footprint of Rogers’ work (or identity) outside of this mention. While the credit on each chart is listed as “Done by Atlanta University”, and the charts are understood to be created in collaboration with his students, I think Du Bois’s lifetime of innovation and thought leadership justifies him to be the author of this series of charts.

Discovering a previously unknown chart

As you can tell, I’ve been interested in the sequence of the charts since the beginning of my research. As I looked for clues about their sequence, I returned to the original exposition photograph to get an understanding of what the team prioritized as important.

What I found was shocking.

While the two “cover” charts are on display, as well as “Taxpayer Property of Negroes in Three United States”, I realized that the top-right chart was not part of the original Library of Congress collection.

From here I enlarged the image and played with the contrast levels to try to learn more about the chart.

I could see it was indeed a unique new piece that had not been studied before but the resolution was not high enough to understand it. So I emailed the librarians at the Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and much to my delight, they responded with a high-res image in just a few hours. I was then able to zoom in on the missing chart. Much to my surprise, the entire work was now legible:

This previously unknown work was hidden in plain sight.

“The Decrease of Illiteracy Among the Black Freedmen of the United States” is a lost work now understood to be part of the second series. The quality of the image is high enough to decipher the text, and for the purpose of this article, I was also able to re-color the work based on the corresponding grey scales in the image.

The chart shows the 36% percent drop in the illiteracy of Freedmen over a 30-year period. The steady decrease statistically proves the voracious appetite for education among African-Americans and defies the racist stereotype of the typical American Negro as an ignorant slave. The newly discovered chart creates a correlation between freedom and education. This chart shows just how systematic Du Bois was in crafting his message and reinforcing it throughout the entire series of statistical charts.

The newly discovered chart acts as a missing link between the 3 views of data for both Illiteracy and the proportion of Freedmen.

Lastly, a footnote on color before moving on.

Since Du Bois employed a limited palette, the grey scale in the photograph could only suggest certain color combinations. Since we know that the newly discovered chart was on display in the exhibit, we know it was meant to be a strong visual. The options below display a few of the possibilities, but I think the green/black combo creates a clear relationship to the other charts in the series.

Systems Thinking in the “Exhibit of American Negroes”

While the discovery of this chart is extremely exciting, it underscores the importance of storytelling in this series of statistical charts. Exploring the relationships between the charts and the cumulative effect of knowledge building that results is ultimately an endeavor to understand how Du Bois considered the persuasive impact of his work.

In November of 1900, Du Bois wrote “The American Negro at Paris” as a report on the exhibition as well as a summary of the events in Paris. In it, he states: “The history of the Negro is illustrated by charts and photographs; there is, for instance, a series of striking models of the progress of the colored people, beginning with the homeless freedman and ending with the modern brick schoolhouse and its teachers. There are charts of the increase of Negro population, the routes of the African slave trade, the progress of emancipation, and the decreasing illiteracy…”

The relationship between freedom to education was one of the most important stories for Du Bois. It’s even more striking that one of the main charts focusing on illiteracy is missing from our historical understanding of his work. By discovering this chart, we gain further insight as to how Du Bois sought to change the perception of African-Americans in Western society.

A lot more work to do: some thoughts on my research

It’s been a remarkable journey. When I began back in March, I thought it would be a fun exercise to learn more about these charts. I was hungry to learn more and couldn’t find anything substantial about them at the time. As I began writing the first article I realized there was so much to be discussed that I expanded my focus to a series of four articles. In the second article, I learned more about the background of the exhibit and began to correspond with several Du Bois scholars, including Eugene F. Provenzo and Silas Munro (one of the authors of the new book). With their encouragement — and a lot of support from the community — I continued to explore Du Bois’s work and eventually was granted a visit to the Library of Congress. I still had more to learn, so the series expanded again to six articles.

There are still many unanswered questions about Du Bois’s data visualizations: Why did they draw the maps in the first series? How are Du Bois’s themes manifested across the entire series? Are more charts missing from the Library of Congress? What role did William Andrew Rogers play and did he create other data visualizations? How was this work received in the exhibits in Buffalo, NY, and Charleston, SC?

Now, at the end (?) of my research, I’m proud to think that I’ve made some contributions to the understanding of Du Bois’s data visualizations. With the release of the new book “W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America,” and with my own work, there is a great deal of new excitement about this previously less-considered work. By exploring Du Bois’s work at the Paris Exposition, a new generation of historians can leverage Du Bois’s charts in the study of African-Americans in US history. By understanding Du Bois’s sociological methods, we gain inspiration in using data to fight prejudice in today’s world.

There are strong indicators that Du Bois’s work will finally be written into the history of data visualization as well. Several leading voices in the data visualization community, like Mona Chalabi, RJ Andrews, and Bill Shander regularly refer to Du Bois’s achievements with hopes that others will follow. While Du Bois’s impact on statistical chart-making may have been overlooked, perhaps his story and ideas can at least be shared within the timeline.

Our understanding of history is changing

We find our global culture at a critical nexus; caught between an embattled version of history that was crafted by the consensus of few, and a more nuanced version of history discussed by many. What began with the crowd-sourcing of knowledge in Wikipedia, now compels us to challenge historical accounts in search of a more diverse approach.

Notable personages are emerging in many disciplines, upending our conventional understanding of timelines and movements. Hilma af Klint’s retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York is radically challenging the previous understanding of modernism. The publishing of the little-known book “Color Problems” by Emily Noyes Vanderpoel in 1901 challenges the terminology and methods for evaluating color relationships. The history of computing now references Grace Hopper and Margaret Hamilton while Katherine Johnson’s contribution to space exploration was turned into a major motion picture in “Hidden Figures.”

The history of data visualization is also far from complete. The amazing book “The Minard System” by Sandra Rendgen presents the collected works of Charles-Joseph Minard, but where is the detailed research on Florence Nightingale? Manual Lima’s remarkable Book of Trees and Book of Circles uncover a wealth of historical visualizations, but who is examining the individual works for their systems and techniques? By exploring the data visualizations of the past, we gain inspiration on how to create new forms of visual communication in the present and future.

I’ll end this series as I did in my presentation at the Tapestry Conference a few weeks ago. I’ve discovered so much on my journey this year. The opportunity to explore the unexplored history of data visualization is manifest. Interest in historic data visualization is growing, our community is supportive, and the global conversation on what is data and how to understand it is a cultural imperative.

So I ask you. What other stories are out there to be found and re-told?

Thank you, thank you, thank you

In each article, I thank the people who have helped me edit and discuss this work — but since this is the last of the series, it’s important to say a few more words to say just how important they have been in encouraging me.

My colleagues at McKinsey’s People Analytics and Measurements team: Rebecca Anderson, Tyler Curtis, Rachel Ramsay, and Lauren Rebagliati for their amazing attention to detail, persistence, and support across 6 articles and 22,000 words

To Bhavna Devani who inspired me to really dig in and explore this work. Who counseled me on writing on race-related issues at the beginning and continued to support and champion me along the way.

To RJ Andrews, Elijah Meeks, and Martin Telefont who always write me back on Twitter and continue to inspire me with their amazing work day after day.

To the Du Bois scholar Eugene F. Provenzo and Silas Munro, who wrote about the charts in the recent “Data Portraits” book, for answering loads of Du Bois questions and sharing their passion and curiosity with me.

To my wife, Jen Ray, for entertaining my endless conversations about 19th-century history and reading each of these long articles a bunch of times.

I also want to send my heartfelt gratitude to the data visualization community which has been so encouraging, especially those attending the Tapestry Conference. I feel like I found my “tribe” this year and I endeavor to contribute to the discussion of our work. It’s gonna be fun!

*Lastly, thanks to Peter Dalgaard for some French corrections on the new image above!

The six-part series:

W. E. B. Du Bois’ staggering Data Visualizations are as powerful today as they were in 1900 

An introduction to the 1900 Paris Exposition, and context for a few charts on history and population growth.

II. Data Journalism and the Scientific Study of “The Negro Problem”

Places this body of work within Du Bois’ larger sociological focus and continues the exploration of many of the charts from the exposition with a focus on education, literacy, and occupation.

III. Exploring the Craft and Design of W.E.B. Du Bois’ Data Visualizations

A detailed examination of how Du Bois drafted his charts, a consideration of this work as a precursor to modernism, and a discussion of his more artistic charts on land ownership and value.

IV. Style and Rich Detail: On Viewing an Original Du Bois Chart

Discoveries on viewing an original chart and further exploration of Du Bois’ more innovative designs dealing with occupation, business, and mortality.

V. Du Bois as Social Scientist and the Legacy of “The Exhibit of American Negroes”

Discusses Du Bois’s body of work and his frustrations with social science despite widespread attention.

VI. The Exhibition as a Whole: an Exciting Discovery

To close out the series I present a previously unknown chart from the series, and discuss the importance of understanding the sequence of the works.

This article originally appeared in Medium but in moving to NightingaleDVS.com, I edited the original text mostly to update some grammar and language substitutions, January 2023.

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