ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Data Visualization and the History of Statistics 1

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Statistical graphics are visual representations of statistical data, such as charts, diagrams, and quantitative maps. Around 1850, these visualizations began to gain traction –first in Europe, then the United States, and eventually beyond– creating new ways to give meaning to statistical data. Far from being neutral images, they have functioned as communicative, rhetorical, and reasoning tools, actively shaping the ways in which data were interpreted, legitimized, and circulated.

This panel aims to investigate how visualizations acquired authority and trust, and how data visualization intersected with issues of uncertainty. The papers explore how conventions of clarity, precision, and what Theodore Porter has termed “trust in numbers” were produced through visual practices; in data visualizations, quantitative procedures intersected with historically specific aesthetic trends, the entanglement of which shaped how people encountered statistical ways of knowing. In keeping with the conference theme “Shifting Perspectives: Plural Worlds, Contested Sciences,” this panel aims to historicize data visualization practices. Our papers embrace a plural understanding of statistics, where mathematical, aesthetic, rhetorical and political practices come together, in recognition that mathematical statistics evolved through diverse epistemic cultures. In so doing, our papers contribute to the understanding of the visual foundations of scientific knowledge and reflect on the ways in which data visualization continues to structure epistemic authority today.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Brianne Wesolowski, Leiden University

Commentator

• Charlotte Bigg, CNRS

Individual Presentations

• A Dispute on Diagrams: Epistemic Conflict on the Graphic Method in Dutch National Statistics, 1870–1890 - Marieke Gelderblom, Utrecht University

• Pearl’s Prophetic Curve: Graphic Methods of Population Forecasting in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Hannah Pivo

• Computing without Computers? The Rise and Fall of 'Graphique', a Graphic Information Processing Method for the Human and Social Sciences. (France, 1947—1990) - Edgar Lejeune

Session Organizers

• Brianne Wesolowski, Leiden University

• Marieke Gelderblom, Utrecht University