VI: Making People See: Claiming Power through Visualizations

This section explores the roles that data visualizations have played directly and intentionally in the public sphere. The persuasive nature of data visualization can support political power. That persuasive nature can also be used to claim power and public attention for those who lack it. These items span visualizations created in the nineteenth century by a young Beothuk woman, early epidemiologists, a wealthy British shipping merchant, American social workers and social activists, and a Black sociologist and civil rights leader. All of whom, spurred by their era’s popular and political fascination with new kinds of charts, created innovative, ground-breaking ways of visualizing data in part to advocate for changes in public policy, urban planning, public health, military policy, and racial justice.

The Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493 was an illustrated encyclopedia of history, geography, and religion.When its compilers chose which subjects to illustrate—with great beauty and at tremendous cost—they included lineages of the royal families of Europe and their connections to Charlemagne, the Roman Empire, and the Roman Catholic Church. The message is that the royal families and their connections to past authority and power, are important and warrant space, resources, and attention. The connection between biblical and religious figures and the linages of the ruling houses of Europe at the time is amplified using the same type of visualization: tree diagrams, which reused the same figures to depict both biblical and historical accounts.

Shanawdithit (1801–1829) was one of the last surviving Beothuk people and a talented creator of data visualizations. In this map of an attack by the British, the Beothuk people are depicted in red and the British in black. In the north is the capture of Demasduwit, wife of the Beothuk leader Nonosbawsut.  Nonosbawsut’s return with additional men is shown later in time but in the same space. He is represented by both the larger red figure as well as the fallen figure after he was killed. Despite her relative lack of power as a young woman living in the culture of those who destroyed her people, Shanawdithit was able to claim an important power: the power of memory and a place in history for the Beothuk people.

Beyond the important work of ensuring a place in history for a conquered people, Shanawdithit should be seen as a someone with a talent for data visualization. Her maps contain elements that were ahead of her time. The person-shaped figures on her map correspond to the number of people in each location and they are colour-coded by category, presaging the invention of Isotypes by Otto and Marie Neurath. The depiction of different groups in conflict moving across both space and time predate the Minard map by several decades. When she died of tuberculosis at age of twenty-eight, her obituary in the London Times noted that she ‘exhibited extraordinary strong natural talents’. Her visualizations commanded attention. One can only speculate as to what this history of data visualization might have contained had her life circumstances been different.