Data by Design: An Interactive History of Data Visualization 1786-1900
Data visualization is not a recent innovation. Even in the eighteenth century, activists and economists, as well as educators and politicians, were fully aware of the power of visualization to produce new knowledge.
But who, more precisely, was wielding this power? On whose behalf? And for whose benefit? The answers to these questions are what this project explores.
By retelling the history of data visualization alongside the histories of colonialism and slavery, we show how questions of ethics and justice have always been present—and continue to offer lessons to viewers and designers of data visualizations today.
Every Datapoint a Person
Description of a Slave Ship
Before there are data, there are people. People who offer up their lives as data — or whose lives become data without consent.
What Visualization Reveals
William Playfair's Time-Series Charts
Data visualization has never been neutral or objective. There is a meaning — and an argument — conveyed through each design.
The Power of the Frame
Shanawdithit's Thematic Maps
Maps can represent reality and can contest it. How can we learn to see the lines of power that they encode?
The Work of Knowledge
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody's Chronological Grids
We have explored only part of the history of data visualization. What possibilities can we imagine when we expand our view of the past?
Between Data and Truth
W.E.B. Du Bois's “Data Portraits”
How can data visualization bear witness to oppression? How can we hold space for what cannot be conveyed through data alone?
From Idea to Insight
The Making of Data by Design
Any digital project is the work of many hands. How can this labor be visualized? What remains out of sight?