Every Datapoint a Person

Before there are data, there are people. People who offer up their lives as data — or whose lives become data without consent.

It was a long and circuitous—and often painful—path that led Olaudah Equiano, the famed author and abolitionist, to London in January 1777. According to his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789), Equiano was born in the Igbo area of the Kingdom of Benin, in what is now southeastern Nigeria1. Kidnapped from his birthplace at the age of 11 and carried to the Atlantic coast, Equiano was then forced aboard a slave ship. There he encountered "a multitude of black people of every description chained together," the captives packed in quarters "so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself."2 Equiano was taken to Barbados and then to Virginia, where he was sold. He would remain enslaved for almost twenty years.

By the time that Equiano settled in London, he had been free for over a decade; in 1766, Equiano had purchased himself, and therefore his freedom, with earnings from his personal trading business. But his experience of enslavement was never far from his mind. And so in the late 1780s, as the British antislavery movement began to coalesce, Equiano became increasingly involved in its activities. Through this abolitionist work, he became acquainted with Thomas Clarkson, a leading white abolitionist and key member of the London Committee of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (SEASE).3 So when, in early 1789, Clarkson received a copy of a diagram created by the Plymouth Committee of SEASE entitled, "Plan of an African Ship's Lower Deck with Negroes in the Proportion of Only One to a Ton," he knew exactly who he should ask to confirm the truth of what he saw.4

The diagram that Clarkson showed to Equiano depicted the configuration of captive bodies in the hold of a slave ship—a "scene of horror almost inconceivable," as Equiano, in his autobiography, described his own first view into the hold, and that his fellow Black British antislavery activist Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, in his own treatise, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787), recalled as such a trauma that he chose not to describe it at all.5 But in the diagram that Clarkson received from the Plymouth Committee, and that he shared with Equiano, Clarkson believed he'd found the key to conveying the depth of this inhumanity to his white compatriots. The diagram, which he would go on to revise and extend, and publish in March of that year as "Description of a Slave Ship," would create an "instantaneous impression of horror upon all who saw it," Clarkson later recalled, and compel them to join the abolitionist cause.6

The "instantaneous impression of horror" that Clarkson hoped his diagram would prompt was, like all carefully-engineered viewing experiences, the result of countless hours of research and design. Given the actual words that Clarkson employed—and in particular, the "instantaneous impression"—it also safe to say that the diagram represented the culmination of over two centuries of thinking about the value of empirical evidence and the impact of giving it visual form.7 Indeed, the idea that evidence could be visualized as data, perceived by the eyes, and then processed into knowledge by the mind, coalesced from the contributions of empiricism in both theory and practice, as well as an increasingly wide array of examples of how numbers and the relationships among them could be abstracted into images that the eye could perceive.

This intellectual genealogy is, as readers might recall, the first of the two stories of data visualization presented in this project's introduction. But in the "horror" that Clarkson engineered his chart to produce, the second story of data visualization—the one having to do with the uneasy alliance between slavery and data—also snaps into view. "Description of a Slave Ship" requires that we consider these two stories together, and in so doing, demonstrates the importance of this braided narrative for the history of the field. 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.

Setting "Description of a Slave Ship" at the center of the story we tell about the emergence of modern data visualization also reminds us that the context of any particular visualization always matters—and that context carries with it both social and political force. More basically, and more profoundly, Clarkson's "Description" reminds us that before there are data there are people—people who offer up their lives to be counted as data, or have their lives counted without their consent. The act of transforming people into data, and of putting that data on display, are both tremendous acts of power. And that power is not guaranteed to always be a benevolent force. Centering "Description of a Slave Ship" in the story we tell about the emergence of data visualization is thus long overdue, for it requires that we recognize the responsibility that comes with this power—the power of visualizing data—which frames what is possible for the viewer to know.

The original engraving that Clarkson showed to Equiano, and that provided him with the visual model for his own, is attributed to the Plymouth Committee as a collective. But it is generally believed that the image was designed by a single man: William Elford, the Committee's chairman and a veritable polymath. A banker by trade, Elford was also an acclaimed painter whose landscapes had shown at the Royal Academy of Arts, as well as an amateur scientist whose experiments had earned him membership in the Royal Society, the highest scientific honor of the time. (Locke, Boyle, Plot, and others mentioned in the Introduction were also members).

Supplementing this range of skills was domain expertise: Elford had family ties to the Royal Navy, and as a result, had early access to a report being prepared by one of its naval captains. Earlier in the year, a group within the British Parliament had tasked the captain, Parrey, with investigating the ships docked in Liverpool that were involved in the transatlantic slave trade. This investigation took both quantitative and qualitative form; in addition to taking precise measurements of the ships and scrutinizing muster logs—lists of crew members aboard any particular ship—Parrey also interviewed the captains and sailors of the ships themselves, learning otherwise undisclosed information about the perils faced by both captives and crew.

The art historian Cheryl Finley, whose book Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship Icon explores the origins and evolving significance of the "Description" in extensive detail, speculates that among the "most useful" artifacts from Parrey's report were the hand-drawn diagrams of the ships created by the captains themselves.8 Intended as "a type of visual shorthand apparently used to increase the efficiency of packing ships," for abolitionist viewers, these sketches likely became a graphic call to arms. Elford, for one, saw a direct visual depiction of the dehumanization that was required in order to reduce human lives into commodity goods on the part of slavery's profiteers.

Readers have already been informed that the default settings for this chapter hide the visual details of the "Description," and the other sensitive images discussed here, until they are sufficiently prepared for what they might see. We made this choice because of the range of harms that can be brought about by engaging with the archive of slavery without warning, context, or consent. These harms may be retrospective, the result of "the uncertain line between witness and spectator" that scholars of slavery often walk, as literary scholar Saidiya Hartman has influentially written.9 They may also be expressed in the form of the desensitization brought about by evermore depictions of the "routinized violence of slavery," Hartman further explains.10 For viewers whose own ancestors were enslaved, such depictions can also exacerbate existing intergenerational trauma, as historian Jennifer Morgan describes.11 Those who choose to view Elford's version of the diagram may do so now by clicking the button at the bottom right. Or you may choose to continue to only read about the images of slavery included here.

Indeed, Elford's diagram—the one that Equiano saw—is as viscerally affecting as it is visually impossible. Viewers see the ship from above, as if they are gods in the heavens. (We will return to what is, in fact, a "god trick" down below). The top deck of the ship has been removed, so that the viewer can see directly into the hold.

Here we might recall how Elford's diagram depicted the captives' bodies with minimal differentiation, which scholars have largely interpreted as reflecting "an abolitionist cultural agenda which dictated that slaves were to be visualized in a manner which emphasized their total passivity and prioritized their status as helpless victims."25 In Clarkson's version, however, the captives are shown wearing loincloths. The men are shackled together in pairs, by both their hands and by their feet. The women, on the other hand, remain unbound, and with their breasts exposed.26

The combined effect was a diagram that engaged the viewer through two very different epistemological registers, both at the same time. First, as a representation of the data that, through its use of naval convention, conveyed its graphical authority; and second, as an intentionally evocative graphic that was intended to elicit a combination of sympathy and shock.27 The desired result of the diagram, driven by empirical evidence and emotion, was that the viewer would perceive the "inhumanity of the trade" through both the eyes and the heart, and prompted by the "instantaneous impression" that it made on the senses, be compelled to act.28

At this juncture one additional point becomes important to say in words: these viewers, like the captives themselves, also had a race: they were white, predominantly British and predominantly men, with lives far removed from the experience of enslavement. In point of fact, Clarkson had an even more specific audience in mind with his design: the Members of British Parliament, who were scheduled to vote on a motion to abolish the slave trade in several weeks' time. One of the London Committee's own members, William Wilberforce, was among them, and he believed, and even said as much, that if the MPs "could actually see one thousandth part of the evils of that practice which they have, for so many years, under one pretense or another, been prevailed on to suffer to be continued," they would quickly commit themselves to the abolitionist cause.29

Here is where we will return to the idea of the "god trick," mentioned earlier in this chapter, and explore its significance in fuller detail. The "god trick" is an idea developed by the feminist philosopher Donna Haraway, which they use to describe the false sense of neutrality that is conveyed through the default perspective of data visualization, the "view from above."30 The view from above can seem godlike—this is the "god" part of Haraway's term—but it is a "trick" because it preys upon our general tendency not to notice, let alone question, any perspective that adheres to the default. In this particular case, the seemingly godlike perspective is, in fact, the perspective of "predominantly white and male abolitionists and lawmakers," as sociologist Simone Browne observes.31 Browne analyzes Clarkson's "Description" in terms of the god trick, and employs it to underscore Haraway's primary point: while the "view from above" may seem like a view "from nowhere," it is in fact a view from somewhere—all viewpoints are.32 For Browne—and, we hope, for you now as well—the "Description" provides unassailable evidence of this fact.

Given Clarkson's own writing on the subject, he would likely not disagree. Clarkson celebrated how the chart "brought forth tears of sympathy in behalf of the sufferers, and it fixed their sufferings in [the viewer's] heart."33 But Browne's analysis of the power relations embedded in the "Description," and more specifically, of "the primacy given in these abolitionist texts to white gazes and vantage points to the trauma of slavery," pushes us as twenty-first century viewers to see more. Looking closely, she explains:

"One can see that each of the tiny black figures are not replicas of each other; rather, some have variously crossed arms, different gestures, or seem to turn to face one another, while some stare and look back at the gaze from nowhere, and in so being the Description of a Slave Ship can also be understood as depicting black looks and the trauma of Middle Passage as multiply experienced and survived."35

Simone Browne

Did Clarkson intend to depict the captives looking back at the viewer, challenging their gaze? Or was it just that, in his commitment to accurate representation, he could not but depict the captives' resistance36 in ways large and small? These questions lack definitive answers, but their possibilities are what matter more. What would it mean to visualize the experience of the Middle Passage from the perspective of the captives themselves? Is this a task that should be undertaken, and if so, by whom? What data would be required? Or, in the absence of data, what information might be marshaled instead? Should the visualization by one that anyone could access? Or is there some knowledge that should be kept from public view?

These were the very questions that I, Lauren, brought to the Data by Design project team. I also brought a dataset: a full download of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, which (as of the time of this writing, in Spring 2024) contains records of 36,150 unique slaving voyages that took place between the years 1514 and 1866, resulting in the captivity and forced migration of an estimated 10.6 million souls.37 Ever since the first release of the database, in 1999 via CD-ROM, scholars and designers have attempted to give this powerful data visual form.38 Perhaps most prominently, in 2016, Andrew Kahn and Jamelle Bouie produced an animated visualization of the data for Slate, the online magazine, which depicted each of the 20,528 voyages that were then in the database as small black dots that were seemingly pulled from the west coast of Africa to the Americas as if by magnetic force.39 While intended to "give sense of the scale of the trans-Atlantic slave trade across time, as well as the flow of transport and eventual destinations," the visualization was roundly critiqued by scholars of slavery for the god's eye perspective that it adopts. As literary scholar Britt Rusert asserts, "It's as if a series of ‘invisible hands' operate the trade," rather than specific people who should be condemned for their acts.40 Although she does not formulate her critique in these exact terms, what Rusert identifies is another version of the "god trick" at work.

Reflecting on this visualization in the context of the questions posed above enabled our project team to clarify our task. We first considered the provenance of the dataset, and reflected on the fact that the shipping logs and other data tables that served as its primary sources were created by the enslavers, and not the enslaved. This reminded us of the power relations embedded in the data, those that could never be removed, as well as of how that power contributed to a range of omissions and gaps. We also reflected on our own subject positions, and the fact that, among the five of us collaborating on this particular visualization, only one of us had ancestors who had themselves been enslaved. This prompted a recognition on behalf of the group that there were certain stories about the data that we could not tell, and should be left for others to convey. Finally, we reflected on Jessica Marie Johnson's powerful statement that "there is nothing neutral, even in a digital environment, about doing histories of slavery."41 This called us back to the range of harms that can be brought about by engaging with this history, as discussed earlier in this chapter, and to how data visualization is not immune. We saw the potential for "second-order violence," as Hartman terms it, both in the act of reanimating a dataset that, in its original form, conscribed the people it represented to living death; and in the act of controlling the layout and motion of this dataset which itself documented the forced migration of so many. From this process, our goal became more refined. In order to honor the enslaved as they lived, and not as they were reduced to data, we would need a visual strategy for showing just how much about these lives the data could not and could never show.

While it would take another nine years—and, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, an additional 1.5 million people or more forcibly separated from their homelands—for the British Parliament to formally abolish the slave trade, historians generally credit "Description of a Slave Ship," and Thomas Clarkson in particular, for a large part of the campaign's success.47 Clarkson himself likely contributed to this narrative; in 1808, one year after the formal Act of Parliament, he published a two-volume tome, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the Slave Trade by the British Parliament, which provided his own first-hand account of British abolition.48

Interspersed among the History's nearly 1,200 pages were four images—among them, a revised version of "Description of a Slave Ship," and a new visualization that Clarkson himself designed. It depicts the history of abolition in the form of a watery network. Each of the "springs and rivulets" is labeled with the name of a significant abolitionist. The streams are arranged from top to bottom, roughly according to time, with horizontal lines separating efforts that took place before 1650, 1700, 1740, and 1787, respectively. As the viewer follows the streams down the page, they converge into "two great political rivers, representing the abolitionist movement in England and America," and while outside of the bounds of the page, presumably meet in the sea.49

On the surface, the metaphor of abolition as a network of streams and rivers flowing into a common sea may seem like an apt representation of a social movement which drew strength from countless individuals and collectives over an extended period of time. This resonance must have been intentional, given how Clarkson elsewhere analogized the British antislavery movement to the distributed functioning of a human body, with "every limb... essentially necessary for the completion of a perfect work."50 And yet, certain key contributors are missing from the chart. Most notably, the name of Olaudah Equiano, or of any other Black abolitionist, is nowhere to be found.

As with "Description of a Slave Ship," the question of audience returns to the fore. This chart was also not designed for those who were enslaved, but rather, for a white British viewership—those who sought to valorize their own role in the fight to end the slave trade. In his analysis of the image, Marcus Wood speculates that this goal—and its disconnection from the actual facts—is the source of the confusion that the visualization ultimately imparts. Clarkson's "attempt to create a self-sufficient cultural history for the cause requires a coherent descriptive model which is capable of overriding the heterogeneity of the names and writings he has furnished" in the text of his volume, Wood asserts, as it does of the composition of the movement overall.51 Here, the success of the movement "belong[s] to no single abolitionist but to a mysterious sea, into which, in a strange reversal of the generative metaphor, al`l the tributaries pour."52 The sea metaphor is further clouded by the role that actual water—namely, the Atlantic Ocean—played in the slave trade. Why would Clarkson use water—the very site of the dehumanization that enslavement brought about—as the anchoring metaphor of his account?

But Clarkson was anchoring his diagram in some stable ground: namely, the then-prevalent use of water and streams to visually represent the passage of time. In Cartographies of Time, Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton position Clarkson's diagram as a direct adaptation of the ideas expressed by the German chronologer, Friedrich Strass, who had published his own widely circulated "Strom der Zeiten" (Stream of Time) only a few years earlier, in 1803. Translated into multiple languages, including English, and widely circulated across Europe and the United States, "Strom der Zeiten" was almost certainly a chart that Clarkson saw. But even if he did not, Clarkson clearly intuited how the water metaphor "gives greater liveliness to the ideas, and impresses events more forcibly on the mind, than the stiff regularity of the straight line," as William Bell, the English translator of Strass's chart, explained.54

Indeed, there is a version of the history of data visualization that need not be significantly reconfigured in order to provide Clarkson with a more prominent place. Many scholars, including Rosenberg and Grafton, have made the case that chronological charts such as those created by Strass and Bell, as well as their more linear antecedents, "cleared the way for statistical graphics" by introducing the idea of consistent scale.55 This argument is confirmed by the purported "pioneer" of statistical graphics himself, William Playfair, the subject of the next chapter, who praised the genre for "making space represent time," and for using "a line of proportional length and in a suitable position."56 As we will learn, Playfair described the purpose of his own visualizations in terms quite similar to Clarkson's: to unite "a number of separate ideas… under one simple impression of vision, and consequently, one act of memory."57

But to simply slot Clarkson into the standard history of the field would miss much of the point. For Clarkson's visualizations, both "Description of a Slave Ship" and his map of abolition, matter as much for the questions that they provoke as they do the knowledge that they reveal. When we look closely at either the diagram or the map, we are prompted to ask what this "impression" conveys and what it omits. We must consider the perspectives of the people for whom these charts have been designed, the people who will benefit from looking, and the people who are merely looked upon. We must consider whose data is on view in any particular chart—and in the case of "Description of a Slave Ship, whose actual lives. And we must consider the potential for violence or harm that visualizing their data might, however inadvertently, bring about. These are not questions that Clarkson himself brings to the fore, but they are ones that we as twenty-first century viewers of his visualizations—and as designers of visualizations as well—should now be required to ask. If these questions seem weighty, it is because they are. Visualizations of data are indeed powerful, as the success of "Description of a Slave Ship" affirms. But it is precisely because of this power that we must continue to probe the nature of the insights that visualization can help to prompt, and the additional insights that it can never convey.

We will never know if these are some of the questions that Equiano posed to Clarkson upon seeing the original diagram, as there is no record of the conversation that transpired. Several weeks later, however, Equiano published a letter in The Public Advertiser, a prominent London newspaper, in which he acknowledged "having seen" the chart.58 Interestingly, Equiano does not comment directly on the image, choosing instead to affirm the work of the abolitionist movement overall. But I believe that we can still learn from Equiano's statement about what he saw. In the diagram, Equiano saw clear evidence that its designers sought to "contribute to so important a moral and religious duty as that of" ending the slave trade. But he also saw that the chart alone would not be enough. As a person who had himself been enslaved, Equiano understood first-hand that ending "one of the greatest evils now existing on earth" would require more than the chart alone could convey. And therein lies the final lesson of "Description of a Slave Ship" for visualization in the present. It has to do with the continued insistence that before there is data, there are people—people with lives that data alone cannot convey. It also underscores how, if the goal of a visualization is to bring about change, then it must necessarily be accompanied by action. To be sure, not all visualizations are designed to effect political change. And in fact, most visualizations are explicitly designed with the opposite goal—of focusing on what the data, itself, can reveal. But the example of "Description of a Slave Ship," which visualizes the most monumental of humanity's stakes, should underscore the responsibility that comes with the design of any visualization—and with the viewing of any visualization as well: to ask what knowledge it can point towards, and what it cannot show.