Visualization and Images

2021-09-16

Foucault wrap-up.

xx: “The fundamental codes of a culture…. establish for every man, from the very first, the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at home.”

Key terms and distinctions

Don Quixote.

Why is Foucault doing this?

If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility - without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises - were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea" (p. 387)

Visual Conventions

Image: Sanna Dullaway

Visual History

The Bedolina Map (6th-4th centuries BCE)

Bedolina Map, appearance

Champlain’s 1612 map of New France.

Data visualization

Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg carte chronologique. 1753

Joseph Priestly (1733-1804)

Priestley’s biographical chart (1765)

Priestley’s historical chart (1769)

J.H. Colton’s Stream of Time, 1842.

The invention of everything.

William Playfair?

James Watt

Line chart, Playfair, 1786

Copperplate engraving

Debt chart, Playfair, 1786

Playfair tries to explain the bar chart:

Suppose the money received by a man in trade were all in guineas,and that every evening he made a single pile of all the guineas received during that day, each pile would represent a day, and its height would be proportional to the receipts of that day; so that by this plain operation,time, proportion, and amount, would all be physically combined. Lineal arithmetic, then, it may be averred, is nothing more than those piles of guineas represented on paper.

Playfair’s Pie and Circle Charts, 1801

Wheat prices: Playfair, between 1821-1823

Galton’s “scatterplot”

The actual picture of Galton’s scatterplot.

19th Century: A golden age.

Guerry’s choropleths, 1820s

John Snow’s cholera map, 1854

Florence Nightingale, 1857 Calendar Clock.

Minard’s map

Pictogram