ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Data Visualization and the History of Statistics 2

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

• Marieke Gelderblom, Utrecht University

Individual Presentations

• Visualizing Data, Envisioning the Other - Sayori Ghoshal, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

• Up to the Sky: Data Visualization Strategies in Grassroots Mobilization during China’s Great Leap Forward - Tianyue Zhou, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg

• Standardizing the Universal: Human Rights, Statistics, and the U.N.’s International Institute of Aging in Malta - Brianne Wesolowski, Leiden University

• Visualizing Climate Change: The Hockey Stick Graph and the Politics of Climate Change - Melissa Charenko, University of Pennsylvania

Session Organizers

• Brianne Wesolowski, Leiden University

• Marieke Gelderblom, Utrecht University