Huzzah, Charts, Huzzah!
In the mid-eighteen hundreds, data visualizations began to be used in a new way. Graphic displays became the currency of serious political and scientific discussion. An early historian of data visualization, Howard Funkhouser (1898–1984), described the era from 1860 to 1890 as the ‘Golden Age’ of graphic representations because of ‘the unrestrained enthusiasm not only of statisticians but of government and municipal authorities, by the eagerness with which the possibilities and problems of graphic representation were debated and by the graphic displays which became an important adjunct of almost every kind of scientific gathering’. Funkhouser points to political, mathematical, and technological reasons for these advances. Governments were collecting and publishing significant amounts of demographic and economic data. The era heralded great strides in the mathematical fields of probability and statistics. At the same time, the commercial availabilty of chromolithography in the 1850s allowed for faster printing and finer gradations of tones and colours, increasing access to visualizations that used shading or filled areas as indicators. There was also a great increase in literacy.
Francis Walker
The Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution called Francis Walker’s Statistical Atlas of the United States, from which these examples are drawn, ‘the best thing of the kind ever attempted for a graphic representation of a vast multitude of important facts’. That assessment might still be true. These examples are both brilliant and beautiful, conveying information clearly, quickly, and without extraneous clutter. The audience’s attention is directed to the data and patterns in the data rather than the charting machinery organizing and displaying the data. The charts reward scrutiny and insights tumble out.
This chart shows share of the population engaged in ‘gainful occupations’ or attending school nationally and by state and broken out by gender. Each square is divided into proportional bars representing the different occupations. The grey, shaded area surrounding each square indicates the share of the population neither gainfully employed nor attending school. One can see straight away the difference between the agricultural-intensive southern states and the more industrial, professional, and education-focused northeast states and California.
This chart shows the distribution by age and sex of the deaths that occurred in each state and nationally during the 1870 census year. These stacked histograms are immediately recognizable to a modern audience as population or age pyramids, but they were a novelty at the time. Infant mortality was a national blight, the depiction of which here is powerfully moving.
This chart shows national revenue, expenditures, and public debt from 1791 to 1870. The effects of the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War of 1847, and the United States Civil War are vividly reflected in each chart. The explosion of public debt after the Civil War is both staggering and telling.
This chart describing the history of the printing at Oxford was created in 1903 by Falconer Madan, the librarian of the Bodleian Library of Oxford University. Oxford University Press was an early adopter of the printing press and published its first book in 1478. The chart shows the three-year average of number of books published as a grey-filled area. Superimposed on the graph as individual line graphs are annual totals with a dashed line, the number of theological books with a red line, and the number of books in the field of Classics with a green line. The theological and Classical books are a subset of the total number.
