Every Datapoint a Person

Before there are data, there are people. People who offer up their lives as data -- or whose lives become data without consent.

It was a long and circuitous—and often painful—path that led Olaudah Equiano," the famed author and abolitionist, to London in January 1777. According to his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789), Equiano was born in the Igbo area of the Kingdom of Benin, in what is now southeastern Nigeria. Kidnapped from his birthplace at the age of 11 and carried to the Atlantic coast, Equiano was then forced aboard a slave ship. There he encountered "a multitude of black people of every description chained together," the captives packed in quarters "so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself."1Equiano sailed to Barbados and then to Virginia, where he was sold into slavery. He would remain enslaved for almost twenty years.

By the time that Equiano settled in London, he had been free for over a decade; in 1766, Equiano had purchased himself, and therefore his freedom, with earnings from his personal trading business. But his experience of enslavement was never far from his mind. Thus in the late 1780s, as the British antislavery movement began to coalesce, Equiano became increasingly involved in its activities. Through these activities, he became acquainted with Thomas Clarkson, a leading British abolitionist and key member of the London Committee of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (SEASE). Thus in early 1789, when Clarkson received a copy of an image created by the Plymouth Committee of SEASE entitled, "Plan of an African Slave Ship's Lower Deck with Negroes in the Proportion of Only One to a Ton," he knew who he should approach for its first endorsement.

In Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship Icon, art historian Cheryl Finley imagines how Equiano might have felt as he encountered the image for the first time:

One can picture how his eyes might have followed the contours of the darkly shaded figures, counting each one, possibly imagining the face of someone he once knew. Fine black lines representing the wall that divided groups of figures by age and sex might have caused him to pause and think about which space he had occupied or the people who had lived and died next to him. The combination of rows and rows of black figures separated and surrounded by fine black lines schematically mapped the space of the hold, marking a route to untold horror.

The route that Finley evokes, the infamous Middle Passage, was what Equiano, one year later, writing in his autobiography, would describe as "a scene of horror almost inconceivable."2 The route was the same that fellow Black British antislavery activist, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, in his own treatise, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, published in 1787, recalled such a trauma that he refused to describe it at all.3But in the image that Clarkson received from the Plymouth Committee, and that he shared with Equiano, he believed he'd found the key to conveying this horror to his white compatriots. The image would create an "instantaneous impression" in "all who saw it" and compel them to join the abolitionist cause.4

The "instantaneous impression" that Clarkson associated with the image, was--like all carefully engineered viewing experiences--the result of countless hours of research and design. It also represented the culmination of over a century of thinking about data and its visual display. Indeed, the idea that evidence could be compiled as data and analyzed in terms of its larger significance, its findings then distilled into clear and compact visual form, took shape over the course of the eighteenth century, guided by (then) new theories about how knowledge is produced and perceived.

Most historians of data visualization agree about this chronology, as well as about the philosophical reorientation that was required for the earliest European exemplars of data visualization to begin to envision their influential designs.5But they have not yet admitted how this philosophical reorientation was the same that enabled the rise of global capitalism—itself undergirded by the practice of slavery that was depicted in the Plymouth Committee's "Plan." Thus in the "instantaneous impression" produced by the image, not one but two salient features of data visualization come into view: the first, of course, is the power of visualization to distill complex information such that insights can easily and efficiently emerge; and the second, equally present, but far less remarked upon, is how the abstraction that is required into to generate insight from complex information always comes at the expense of the particularities—and the context—that the data purports to represent.

Setting the "Plan of an African Slave Ship's Lower Deck…" at the center of the story we tell about the emergence of modern data visualization serves as a powerful reminder that the history of data and its visual display is intertwined with the history of both capitalism and slavery. It also reminds us that the context of any particular visualization always matters—and that context carries with it both social and political force. More basically, and more profoundly, the "Plan" reminds us that before there are data there are people—people who offer up their lives to be counted as data, or have their lives counted without their consent. Thus every design process must be accompanied by a consideration of the ethical issues engaged—both by those who design visualizations and those who perceive them as well. In short, the "Plan" epitomizes the necessary trade-offs and inherent contradictions involved in visualizing data, those which often result in profound human cost. Placing the "Plan" at the center of the story that we tell about the emergence of modern data visualization thus reminds us of the power—for good and for harm—that is involved in a technique that produces new knowledge at the same time that it seeks to put that knowledge on view.

Like the history of data visualization itself, there is no clear starting point for the development of the "Plan of an African Slave Ship," nor is there even a definitive version. It is generally agreed upon that the idea to create the "Plan" originated with another white British abolitionist William Elford, the chairman of the Plymouth Committee of SEASE and a veritable polymath. A banker by trade, Elford was also an acclaimed painter whose landscapes had shown at the Royal Academy of Arts, as well as an amateur scientist whose experiments had earned him a Fellowship of the Royal Society, the highest scientific honor of the time. Supplementing these skill was domain expertise: Elford had family ties to the Royal Navy, and as a result, had early access to a report being prepared by one of its naval captains, Captain Parrey. Commissioned by British Parliament, Parrey had been tasked with investigating the ships docked in Liverpool that were involved in the transatlantic slave trade. His research was both quantitative and qualitative; in addition to taking precise measurements of the ships and scrutinizing muster logs—lists of crew members aboard any particular ship—Parrey also interviewed the captains and sailors of the ships themselves, learning otherwise undisclosed details about the perils faced by crew members aboard these ships.

Finley speculates that among the "most useful" artifacts included in Parrey's report were the hand-drawn diagrams of the ships created by the captains themselves, which indicated the "cargo area and the space allotted for the different types of goods to be stowed."6Intended to maximize the efficiency of packing cargo on board—since, of course, the principal objective of these ships was financial profit—the diagrams became inspiration to Elford, who recognized in the simple sketches a visual representation of the violence that accompanies the reduction of richly lived lives to commodity goods.

The idea that quantitative information can be abstracted into pure numbers, so as to be given visual form, is often considered the conceptual precondition that paved the way for the technique of data visualization to emerge. In The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Edward Tufte makes the case that QUOTE. But what has gone unmentioned in discussions of the history of data visualization is how that same conceptual precondition—of the abstraction of complex information into more tractable numerical form—was what led to the rise of modern capitalism. As Ian Baucom, following Mary Poovey, explains, "what distinguishes European modernity's knowledge projects (scientific, governmental, and aesthetic) from classical Aristotelian models of epistemology—which had bred abstractions from abstractions (universals from a priori truths)—is that for European modernity abstraction predicates itself on observed particulars, assemblages of fact from which abstract reason can never entirely detach itself, and whose relation to the abstracting impulse's systematic or universal truth claims, Europe's modern philosophical, social, and political discourses continuously oblige themselves to theorize."22

This "will to abstraction, the will to derive systematic knowledges, general theories, or any number of the other 'versions of abstraction: universals, generalizations, aggregates' from observed particulars," as Ian Baucom, quoting Mary Poovey, explains, … COMPLETE THIS. // CONNECT TO RISE OF ABSTRACT PROPERTY, WORK IN QUOTE: Indeed, to the extent that the case of the Zong was to help define the struggle between slave traders and abolitionists in the late eighteenth century, the way in which that struggle was waged suggests that it was not only a struggle between competing theories of right (the slaves' right to human dignity and the slavers' right to trade), but one between competing theories of knowledge, a struggle between an empirical and a contractual, an evidentiary and a credible epistemology. As such, this struggle both extends and replays what scholars in recent years have taken to be the central epistemological drama of the long eighteenth century, the drama—emerging from the social rivalry of the old landed and the new moneyed classes—in which, as mobile property displaced ''real' property, and the imaginary value of stocks, bonds, bills-of-exchange, and insured property of all kinds increasingly trumped the ''real' value of land, bullion, and other tangibles, the concepts of what was knowable, credible, valuable, and real were themselves transformed. 16

For Baucom and Poovey, as for many others, the Ur example of the "will to abstraction" that sustains modern capitalism is slavery. Understood in Baucom's terms, slavery becomes the abstraction of human lives into their monetary value. This process is no more apparent than in the legers of slave ships which abstract the value of their human captives into the monetary value of each when sold. And while the creation of the Brooks diagram was intended to push back against this violent abstraction, it nevertheless engages in its own process of abstraction. As Baucom explains, "The print seeks simultaneously, dialectically, to turn the empire's disinterested modern science of wealth sentimentally against itself by fashioning a visible abstraction (an image of what we cannot see) designed not merely to account for the trade but to ‘give the spectator an idea of the sufferings of the Africans in the Middle Passage, and this so familiarly, that he might instantly pronounce upon the miseries experienced there.'" 23

There is one additional aspect of this process of generalizing from observed particulars that this "visible abstraction" helps to expose, and that is how the translation from observed particulars to "theories, aggregates, universals, ideas, or any other type of abstraction is not reason but fiction or the imagination." 24 Clarkson's desire that the diagram will "give the spectator an idea of the sufferings of the Africans in the Middle Passage" draws upon the viewer's imagination, and their sympathy, and not any rational response. In her analysis of Clarkson's diagram, she underscores this point: "Despite its graphic flourishes and details, this plan was not a realistic representation of the space available or the conditions characteristic of a slave ship hold. Instead it was an abstraction. As with the Plymouth plan, the schematic drawings, easy to grasp and hold in the memory, were elaborated by the descriptive text." 25

Clarkson himself understood as much, writing: "To persons unacquainted with the mode of carrying on this system of trading in human flesh, these Plans and Sections will appear rather a fiction, than a real representation of a slave-ship." But as Finley observes, "Clarkson's distinction between a fictional versus a "real representation" introduces aesthetic and political debates regarding the imaging and imagining of the slave ship that remain in place across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries by shedding light upon the formal and thematic inspiration for a vast majority of contemporary African American and black diasporic artists. A recognition of the enduring significance of white dominant emphases upon a literalized and figurative and therefore seemingly authentic or "real representation" over and above abstracted and experimental representations typically dismissed only as a visual fabrication speaks to a white racist terrain characterized by invisibilized black histories, narratives, and memories." In a sense, the bodies represented in the diagram are not abstracted into monetary currency but instead a moral currency—the currency of the white-led abolitionist movement. Thus alongside questions about the ethics of abstracting lives into data come questions about the ethics of who is doing the abstracting, and for whom it is intended to be perceived.

Far from the margins of the history of data visualization, it's possible to tell a story of the origins of data visualization that places Clarkson and his thinking at its core. This history passes through many of the images already familiar to scholars of historical data visualization, but it places these images in the context of the questions that must accompany them. These questions have to do with the source of the data that is included, as well as what is deliberately excluded or, alternately, impossible to capture in quantitative form. They also have to do with the intended audience for the visualization, as well as the intentions of those who design it. With these questions in mind, we might turn to another visualization designed by Thomas Clarkson, which is also often included in histories of data visualization.

This image, a so-called stream chart that Clarkson included in his 1808 volume, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the Slave Trade by the British Parliament, presents the history of abolition in the form of a watery network. Each of the "springs and rivulets" are labeled with the name of a significant abolitionist. They are also visualized according to time, with horizontal lines indicating efforts that took place before 1650, 1700, 1740, and 1787, respectively. As the viewer follows the streams from top to bottom, in the direct of time, the tributaries converge into "two great political rivers, representing the abolitionist movement in England and America." 26

On the surface, the metaphor of abolition as a watery network, with many tributaries that feed a larger river, seems like an apt representation of a social movement which drew strength from countless individuals and collectives over an extended period of time. This conception must have been known to Clarkson, given his work with the London Committee, which he once described as [BODY QUOTE]. And yet, in adapting the model of the hydrographic map to the abolitionist movement, Clarkson rewrites the history of abolition through what Marcus Wood characterizes as "the new, lean, scientific conventions of late-eighteenth-century hydrography. Each abolitionist is a clean new river with a clear European name," with "Africa off the map" altogether. 27 Wood's critique calls attention to how the colonizing purpose of hydrography and the abolitionist diagram are the same: both overtake the territory that is pictured—and the people who live there—with the British imperial mission. Here, it is not the discovery of new land, but the discovery of the horrors of slavery, that were of course already known to those who experienced its direct effects. Here, as in the slave ship daigram, the question of audience comes to the fore: this chart was not designed for those who were enslaved, but for a British viewership that sought to valorize its own role in the fight to end slavery.

Even as the stream chart shares the colonizing impulse as the slave ship diagram, as well as its graphical authority, it bears far less correlation to the facts. "In many ways there is no rhyme or reason to the figures he selects," Wood explains, "his attempt to create a self-sufficient cultural history for the cause requires a coherent descriptive model which is capable of overriding the heterogeneity of the names and writings he has furnished. Clarkson's map imposes order on chaos by providing an abolition tree of Jesse. The fruitful loins belonging to no single abolitionist but to a mysterious sea, into which, in a strange reversal of the generative metaphor, all the tributaries pour." 28

The Neuraths explicitly aligned themselves with the Brooks—and with people and politics—at the same time that they rejected visualization strategies that, they felt, lacked commensurate communicative richness. Christopher Burke, the typeface designer and historian, believes that the Neuraths probably deliberately chose to exclude Playfair from their collection. 35 Trained as a political economist, Otto Neurath was almost certainly familiar with Playfair's work. Less speculative is Marie Neurath's blanket critique of time-series charts, quoted by Burke: "Curves are subject to much stronger demands for precision than pictorial representation. And so it is all the more embarrassing when they do not fulfill these demands. A method of statistics that works with countable elements, as pictorial statistics does, hardly gives any occasion for error. Its advantages are not only educational but also logical." 36 Marie Neurath was more correct than she could have known, as will be discussed in the next chapter. [ MAYBE START NEXT CHAPTER W/ THIS ??? ]

It seems more than coincidental that Edward Tufte would critique ISOTYPE on the way to establishing his own lineage of the history of data visualization, the one which places Playfair at its center. For Tufte, as for Playfair and for those who followed in his wake, the idea of a neutral, objective representational form seemed possible, and desirable. And yet, as the current political moment has shown, data and its visual display is always political. With this in mind, we must work to develop visual typologies that reattach—rather than sever—the data to the people it represents.

Consider a recent visualization, of the people killed by guns in the US. [DESCRIBE; SHOW].

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2021/may/27/us-mass-shootings-database

Of course not all data is about people, nor are questions about ethics TKTK equally relevant at any particular time. One of the only rules of a visualization practice that seeks to attend to the specificity of the data is to never say never in design. 37 But another fundamental rule of this enlightened practice is to always consider the possibility from the beginning; to interrogate our own positionalities, the people we've involved in our projects, as we well as the project's potential for impact or harm.

Taking the lessons of the Brooks, as well as these questions to mind, might we visualize additional populations working to combat gun violence, or other social harms? How might we honor the people behind the data, and insist on connecting numbers back to their richly lived lives?

ENDING VIS HERE, BLACK DATA, COVIDBLACK, SOMETHING HERE???