An upcoming Stanford Humanities Center lecture:
“The Line Graph and the Slave Ship: Rethinking the Origins of Modern Data Visualization” by Lauren Klein of Emory Univ., on Tuesday 4/15, from 4–6 pm in Levinthal Hall and online
Summary: “The Line Graph and the Slave Ship” returns to the eighteenth-century origins of modern data visualization in order to excavate the meaning — and power — of visualizing data. Exploring two examples of early data visualization — the line graphs of British trade data included in William Playfair’s Commercial and Political Atlas (1786) and Description of a Slave Ship (1789) created and circulated by a group of British antislavery activists — this lecture will connect Enlightenment theories about visual and statistical knowledge to contemporaneous ideas about personhood and race.
I’m posting this as an example of the sort of fascinating research supported by the SHC, looking in fresh and unexpected ways at events, practices, and conceptualizations from many times, places, and social settings.
[An anecdote. Just yesterday my caregiver J and I branched from a discussion of rich people and poor people into related topics — among them, jobs we’d had (we both had our moments as gas station attendants) and the physical settings of where people live (rich people live in the hills, poor people in the flats), this latter topic starting from one of J’s jobs (delivering food in Pacifica CA), leading me to cite Berkeley CA, and then, startlingly, we both came up with the same example, the gigantic favelas of Sao Paulo in Brazil. Which I happened to know a fair amount about thanks to research carried out by one of the fellows at the SHC when I was a fellow there, almost two decades ago.]
But now a little bit about Lauren Klein and then about William Playfair, who plays a central role in LK’s paper.
Lauren Klein, who is she? From the Emory University website:
Lauren Klein is Winship Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Professor in the departments of Quantitative Theory & Methods and English at Emory University.
She also serves as director of the Emory Digital Humanities Lab and PI of the Mellon-funded Atlanta Interdisciplinary AI Network. Before moving to Emory, she taught in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. Klein’s research brings together computational and critical methods in order to explore questions of gender, race, and justice. She is the author of An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and, with Catherine D’Ignazio, the award-winning Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020). With Matthew K. Gold, she edits Debates in the Digital Humanities, a hybrid print-digital publication stream that explores debates in the field as they emerge
From Wikipedia:
Klein studied comparative literature and computer science at Harvard University. Before returning to graduate school, she worked as a software developer and bike messenger. She received her Ph.D. in English and American Studies from the Graduate Center, CUNY in 2011.
William Playfair. From Wikipedia:
William Playfair (22 September 1759 – 11 February 1823) was a Scottish engineer and political economist. The founder of graphical methods of statistics, Playfair invented several types of diagrams: in 1786 he introduced the line, area and bar chart of economic data, and in 1801 he published what were likely the first pie chart and circle graph, used to show part-whole relations.
… his older brother John Playfair [was] the distinguished Edinburgh mathematics professor
April 13, 2025 at 4:59 pm |
A YouTube video I watched recently, The Surprising Success of Gondola Transit Systems by Wendover Productions, provides an example of an exception to rich people living in the hills and poor people in the flats: La Paz, Bolivia uses gondolas to provide cheap, reliable public transportation to lower income people living in the hills.
April 13, 2025 at 5:08 pm |
Nice. J and I weren’t suggesting Hills Rich / Flats Poor as a cultural universal, of course; the details of the topography and climate — and accidents of history — will determine how things work out.