Data visualization is not a recent innovation. Even in the eighteenth century, economists and educators, as well as artists and illustrators, were fully aware of the inherent subjectivity of visual perception, the culturally-situated position of the viewer, and the power of images in general—and of visualization in particular—to convey arguments and ideas. In this talk, I examine the history of data visualization in relation to feminist theory, which has also long attended to the subjective nature of knowledge and its transmission. Exploring the visualization work of three female educators from the nineteenth century, Emma Willard, Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps, and Elizabeth Peabody, I show how we might recover these women’s contributions to the development of modern data visualization techniques. I contend, moreover, that by conceiving of data visualization as a feminist method, we might better understand its function—in the nineteenth century and today—as a way to present concepts, advance arguments and perform critique.

1. FEMINIST DATA VISUALIZATION
Umeå University
HUMlab
2 October 2014
Lauren F. Klein
Georgia Institute of Technology
lauren.klein@lmc.gatech.edu

3. “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence,
Data Visualization, and James Hemings,” in
American Literature 85.4 (December 2013)

4. Above: An
interactive visual
interface for
exploring topic
models.
Right: A diagram of
the network of
relations of Thomas

5. Emma Hart Willard
(1787-1870)
Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps
(1793-1884)
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody
(1804-1894)

6. Ptolemy’s world map, as reconstructed from the Geographica (ca. 150 AD) in the 1400s.

7. Map of planetary cycles, ca. 900 AD

8. Nicholas Oresme’s proto-bar charts
(ca. 1350).

9. William Playfair
(1759-1823)

10. William Playfair, from The Commercial and Political Atlas (1786)

11. Peter Guillet, The Timber Merchant’s Guide (1823)
Peter Guillet, The Timber Merchant’s Guide (1823)

12. “On inspecting any one of these Charts attentively, a sufficiently distinct impression will be made, to
remain unimpaired for a considerable time, and the idea which does remain will be simple and
complete.”

13. William Playfair, from An Inquiry into the Permanent Cause of the Decline and Fall of
Wealthy and Powerful Nations (1805)

14. William Playfair, “CHART, Shewing at One View The Price of The Quarter of Wheat, & Wages of
Labour by the Week, from The Year 1565 to 1821” (1822)

15. “The minds of men, the boundaries of nations, their laws and relations
with each other, are all in a state of change, and commerce must feel the
consequences of those events of which it has been a principal cause.
“Should those revolutions and partitions already effected, or about to be
attempted, produce, as usual, political fermentation in proportion to their
importance, Europe may probably be convulsed with war for fifty years to
come. The last century has been the century of arts and commerce, this newly
commenced may then be that of war and contention. If it turns out so, a
picture of the past will be a valuable thing, if, on the contrary, commerce
should continue its progress, this will make the first part of a great whole,
which, when completed on some future day, will be a most valuable work.”
“It is not only of importance that this species of information should be handed
down, but also that it should go down in such a form and manner as that
any person might even, though a native of another country, understand
the nature of the business delineated.”
-- William Playfair, “Preface to the Third Edition,” The Commercial and
Political Atlas (1801).

16. William Playfair, “CHART, Shewing at One View The Price of The Quarter of Wheat, & Wages of
Labour by the Week, from The Year 1565 to 1821” (1822)
Michael Friendly, “from “A Brief History of Data Visualization” (2006)

19. Johan Heinrich Lambert,
Farbenpyramide (1772)

20. “A humanistic approach [to visualization]
means that the premises are rooted in the
recognition of the interpretative nature of
knowledge, that the display itself is
conceived to embody qualitative
expressions, and that the information is
understood as graphically constituted”
(129).
Johanna Drucker, Graphesis: Visual
Forms of Knowledge Production
(Harvard, 2014)

21. Emma Willard, Temple of Time (1846)

22. Emma Willard, “Introductory” map of American history (1828)

23. Emma Willard, “Picture of Nations” (1835)

24. Joseph Priestley, A New Chart of History (1769)

25. Emma Willard, Temple of Time (1846)

26. Emma Willard, Temple of Time (1846)
http://blogs.princeton.edu/rarebooks/2008/12/standing_within_the_temple_of.html

27. Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps and Thirza Lee, from Familiar Lectures on Botany (1828)

28. Alexander von Humboldt, “Géographie des plantes équinoxiales” (1807)

29. Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps and Thirza Lee, from Familiar Lectures on Botany (1828)

30. “The study of Botany seems peculiarly adapted to Females; the objects of its
investigation are beautiful and delicate; its pursuits, leading to exercise in the
open air, are conducive to health and cheerfulness. It is not a sedentary study
which can be acquired in the library; but the objects of the science are
scattered over the surface of the earth, along the banks of the winding
brooks, on the borders of precipices, the sides of mountains, and the
depths of the forest…
“The deity has not only placed before us an almost infinite variety of objects; but
he has given to our minds the power of reducing them into classes, so as to
form beautiful and regular systems, by which we can comprehend, under
a few terms, this vast number of individual things, which, without system,
would present to our bewildered minds a confused and indiscriminate mass.
This power of the mind, so important in classification, is that of discovering
resemblances.”
-- Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps, Familiar Lectures on Botany (1828)

31. Elizabeth Peabody,
from A Chronological
History of the United
States (1856)

33. Elizabeth Peabody,
from A Chronological
History of the United
States (1856)

38. Above: Jacques Bertin,
Sémiologie graphique (1967)
Right: Leland Wilkinson,
The Grammar of Graphics (2000)

39. Left: Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1986)
Right: Stuart Card, Jock Mackinlay, Ben Schneiderman, Readings in Information
Visualization: Using Vision to Think (1999)

40. Rebecca Solnit, from Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (2010)

41. Questions? Comments?
lauren.klein@lmc.gatech.edu