Edmond Halley’s 1686 diagram
Maybe going too deep, but Halley's 1701 isogonic/contour line map of magnetic declination is so relevant here too, again underlining how "data maps" go with colonial expansion--and maybe specifying that it is a certain kind of precise, informatic map that is in your sights here?
This account also begins in Europe, also in the exploratory air of the Renaissance, but it involves men who, instead of fixing their eyes on the heavens, set their sights on the seas.
Sylvia Wynter here!!! On how Copernican astronomy is related to (even enabled by) Portuguese voyages south into the "torrid zone".
Robert Boyle developed his law describing the relationship between the pressure and volume of air.
Would just mention here that Boyle (and his close collaborator) Hooke's attitude to data visualization does not fit very easily with Galileo or especially Newton's. Thinking especially of Micrographia and super ornate microscopic drawings, or just the really messy frontispiece of Boyle's New Experiments, all of them trying to capture sensory detail rather than abstraction. That contrast also helps you undermine the "story" here--the relationship between "empiricism" (whatever that is) and "data visualization" is actually not necessarily very close, even on its own terms.
In support of this ideal, Tufte constructs his own timeline for the history of the field, one that borrows from nineteenth and twentieth-century histories, and that has been carried into the twenty-first century largely unchanged. 11 This chronology looks back to the late eighteenth-century time-series charts of the Swiss-German mathematician Johann Heinrich Lambert and the Scottish political economist William Playfair—the subject of the second chapter of this book—who, together, Tufte dubs “the two great inventors of modern graphical designs.”
One possible context here is the history of differentiating English print genres from each other during the long eighteenth century. After all, all of these charts you're discussing are also just stuff printed on paper (rather than, by and large, sung or pantomined or danced and so on) that gradually differentiated in form from all the other stuff printed on paper (and maybe Peabody's medium is particularly interesting to contrast here or there). Parallel to all the extensive research about how (particularly) novels were separated from short fiction, history, travelogues, memoir, newspapers, drama, painting, etc. it seems there is a similar process that eventually splits “data visualization” from maps, tables, numbers, writing, physical objects, etc. Like for print genres, too, much of this splitting also seems to be a retroactive imposition from cultural elites in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where the actual period objects don’t accord with that distinction (e.g., Minard’s actually pretty confusing and mixed visualization). There are tons of scholarly works that discuss generic differentiation in this period; an older one that might be particularly useful, given the discussions of period journalism and your incorporation of data interactive practices from current journalism, is Lennard Davis’s Factual Fictions about the novel and the newspaper.
a process that is far longer and more hard-won.
You’re arguing in this intro (and throughout the project) that every visualization has a context, whether it presents it or not, where seemingly empty space without “chart junk” is itself carrying colonial violence, genocide in the Americas, and the abstraction of racial capitalism. Your intervention is to push for designers to actually narrate that context and make an active, explicit choice about where their visualizations sit within it—in other words, to show their work by showing the context rather than ruling out “junk”. That kind of contextualization necessarily does not align with a simple and immediate impression: data visualizations have to say multiple things over some period of temporal engagement, not one thing in a moment. So there’s also a rationale in starting with scrolling through a timeline/shuffle itself plus the accompanying text always alongside it: data visualization does not begin with a single instantaneous impression, Minard ex machina, but instead arises from this longer, entangled history that has many entry points and that should be actively narrated.
The point of that opening discussion is maybe that it takes a while to see the point—that scrolling through the gradual formation of the timeline (and as you've noted, the scroll bar and side by side text seems so central to your methodology in this project), through all the literal text that is with the iterations, models your alternative approach, where visualization is a longer and more reflective process.
All the above is obviously made very clear in the Peabody chapter, but I wonder if it’s worth stressing it more from the beginning of the introduction.
This expanded account underscores the tremendous power of data visualization to distill complex information such that insight can easily and efficiently emerge, while at the same time reminding us—both those who design visualizations and those who perceive them—how the abstraction that is required to efficiently generate insight always comes at the expense of additional detail—detail that data alone cannot convey.
I like how the above discussion of "instantaneous impressions" connects to the epistemology of sentimentalism. Jessica Riskin’s Science in the Age of Sensibility is really good on this, showing how much “sensibility” in eighteenth-century French science (plus Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley) doubled down on Lockean empiricism, with the elaboration that knowledge from sensory impressions should arise just via its impact on the mind but also the body, emotions, and morals. Not that this linkage should simply be celebrated, especially in its ableist undertones. But the empiricism-sentimentalism symbiosis shows how the embrace of emotion in scientific representations has also been there for centuries.
There are the related abundant critiques of sentimentalist abolitionist representations, thinking for example of Hortense Spillers on pornotroping, Lynn Festa’s Sentimental Figures of Empire, or Equiano’s own refusal to redescribe the tortures of slavery that are already so known and so widely-circulated. A major problem they all highlight is how suffering is too legible in these representations and the corresponding emotional reaction too immediate, simple, and perhaps fleeting. Your extended analysis of the slave ship diagram and your alluvial visualization again does something very different: your work embraces emotion but makes it an extended, thoughtful embrace, really sitting with the complex feelings (and especially the complex ethics of abstraction). This goes back to the overall argument about context and taking time to make a complex point through a visualization, but now also in a way that accounts for some of the troubling legacies of abolitionist representations of slavery.
So maybe this is a long way of saying that all of this fits really well in histories of eighteenth-century science and culture! But also maybe a suggestion to play up this contextual link more.
Crucially for Haraway, as for McKittrick,
I would hesitate to align McKittrick's theory of relational knowledge with Donna Haraway’s situated knowledge. Dear Science is pretty explicit about distancing relational knowledge from situated knowledge: “A black sense of place is not a standpoint or a situated knowledge; it is a location of difficult encounter and relationality” (106). She works this out at greater length in the chapter on Zong!, especially page 135. She also pointedly does not mention Haraway in the index. More generally, some of Haraway’s comments on the Plantationocene made her “nauseous and very angry”:https://twitter.com/demonicground/status/1370462540036198402?lang=en ; she also has repeatedly pointed out that Haraway developed situated knowledge through her reading of Buchi Emecheta (Dear Science 130, also https://twitter.com/demonicground/status/824424767268782080 ). My thought is that your approach in this project is maybe closer to McKittrick than Haraway, in that you show how we can know things through creative data visualizations that are “creating works that are tandem with, yet imagine futures outside, colonial logics” (https://revolutionarydemandforhappiness.com).
In her acclaimed recent book, Dear Science and Other Stories, Black studies scholar Katherine McKittrick takes on the project not of history but of science, explaining how an account that centers Black people, Black life, and Blackness more broadly can reveal the "asymmetrically connected knowledge systems" that structure modern scientific inquiry.
I think you could maybe make McKittrick's book an even bigger part of DxD, maybe even moving it into the introduction, too? Your team is mounting a strong alternative to the simple and instantaneous impression and its associated epistemology, in favor of an epistemology that is still related to empirical experience and quantification but that does not aim to make experience rapidly extractable. I think this is a big point of resonance between your work and Dear Science—to reconceive science as wondering about things we don’t know through creative representations of experience that is located at the intersection of our bodies, our relations to colonial knowledge systems, and grounds that may be outside those systems.
As Playfair elaborates the impetus behind the "form and manner" of his charts, he makes clear that his intended audience is not "any person" in the world, but rather, the narrower demographic of "men of high rank, or active business"21 These men, he continues, "can only pay attention to general outlines; nor is attention to particulars of use."
A relevant citation here that might really resonate with the tech and design audience is Jenny Odell on temporality (both in the earlier book on doing nothing and the more recent book about measuring time), as well as her own visualizations/maps. Odell might help you align the instantaneous impression of normative data visualization with the rushed, productive temporality of capitalism (as in that great quote about “men of business” needing simple images), then position the busier, contextualized presentation of data that your project models with a more livable kind of time.