Abstract
During the course of his life, Steve Fienberg made important contributions to a remarkably broad range of topics. Because of his desire to communicate effectively and broadly what are sometimes a complex web of facts, he naturally gravitated toward data visualization. In this essay we describe the origins of data visualization and its nineteenth century explosion of use after the rise of empiricism that bloomed during the Scottish Enlightenment. In the course of the essay, we describe the work of some of our heroes of data visualization and the “beautiful evidence” their work yielded.
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Notes
- 1.
Maps were developed independently in the Far East. During the Warring States period in China (about 227 BCE), we find the first mention of a Chinese map being drawn. It showed a portion of Dukang that the Yan State was to cede to the King of Qin in exchange for peace.
- 2.
Plot’s proposed method of crowd-sourcing weather data and his assessment of its potential value would later bear great fruit in Francis Galton’s (1863) spectacular discovery of weather patterns in the northern hemisphere.
- 3.
Ironically, had Galton paid close enough attention to his own graphs he would have been able to foresee the financial crisis of 1831 that created a ruinous run on his own bank.
- 4.
For more about the remarkable life and accomplishments of William Playfair (including the fascinating story of his attempted blackmail of Lord Archibald Douglas), the interested reader is referred to Spence and Wainer (1997, 2000), Wainer (1996), Wainer and Spence (1997), and, especially, Wainer and Spence’s Introduction to Playfair (1801/2005).
- 5.
From page 17 in Lorraine J. Daston and Peter Galison’s, marvelous 2007 book, Objectivity (Daston and Galison, 2007).
- 6.
Marey (1878, p. vi)
- 7.
Although with such contributors as Condorcet (1743–1794), von Humboldt (1769–1859), and Florence Nightingale (1820–1910), there was certainly room for genius in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, Galton’s weather maps, developed at the end of the nineteenth century, shows how plodding reliability when adjoined with moody brilliance can yield especially fruitful results, yet no one would doubt that Robert Plot was a plodding plotter.
- 8.
This simple? Perhaps not. An alternative thesis to the one that characterizes science’s task as capturing the glorious revelations by nature of her sublime design is one that sees humans imposing the order of their senses and their arts upon the unheavenly disorder they find themselves amidst.
- 9.
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Wainer, H., Friendly, M. (2022). On the Origins of Data Visualization. In: Carriquiry, A.L., Tanur, J.M., Eddy, W.F. (eds) Statistics in the Public Interest. Springer Series in the Data Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75460-0_27
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