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Data by Design: An Interactive History of Data Visualization 1786-1900

It is often said that “the purpose of data visualization is insight: to produce the kind of “ah ha moment” in the mind of the viewer when something snaps into focus that was previously too difficult, too distributed, or too complex to otherwise see. For those who design data visualizations, however, insight comes about through a process that is far longer and more hard-won.

This lesson came home to our project team in the waning days of summer 2021 as we iterated on the design for the front page of this site. Ever since the first prototype of Data by Design, there had always been a prominently-positioned timeline to welcome visitors to the site—first an actual line, then illustrated with images, and then a more designerly version that arranged each year’s images into artfully arranged stacks.

It all made sense: this project has a distinct chronological arc. It looks at how ideas from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the concept of data had just begun to crystalize, inform today’s world in which we generate data with our every waking moment (and sometimes even with our sleeping ones). And it explores examples from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the idea of visualizing data was itself an innovation, connecting them to the present moment in which anyone with an internet connection and an account on any number of software platforms can go from data to chart in a series of clicks.

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IN PROGRESS
Every Datapoint a Person
Diagram 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.
COMING SOON
Narratives of Possession
Shanawdithit's Narrative Maps
Maps can create nations and contest them.
How have maps been used to document multiple pasts?
The Work of Knowledge
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody's Chronological Grids
We have come to believe that data visualizations should be clear and efficient. Is there value in designs that make us pause and reflect?
Between Data and Truth
W. E. B. Du Bois's “Data Portraits”
How can data visualization bear witness to oppression? How can it hold space for what cannot be conveyed through data alone?
COMING SOON
The Process is the Product
The Making of Data by Design
Any digital project is the work of many hands. How can this labor be visualized? What labor remains out of sight?