What Data Visualization Reveals: Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and the Work of Knowledge Production

Abstract

This essay offers the chronological charts of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804–1894), the 19th-century educator and intellectual, as early examples of how data visualization can reveal a range of forms of knowledge. It challenges the universality of the goals of clarity and efficiency when designing data visualizations, and argues for the value of visualizations that encourage sustained reflection and imaginative response. Drawing from feminist and Black studies scholarship, it confirms how visual knowledge is informed by the social, cultural, and political contexts that surround it, and how an awareness of those contexts can lead to more intentional and more effective visualization design. It concludes with a call to expand the archive of data visualization so that visualization designers, in the present, might be prompted to imagine a wider and more capacious array of visual and interactive forms.