I don't believe Dubois's source here was the census atlas though; Gannett did visualize this for the african-american population. There's a little fragment from my project about this chart here: https://creatingdata.benschmidt.org/Dubois_and_Gannett. As I note there, it's actually Gannett's 1894 "Statistics of the negroes in the United States" that contains the source for this chart; even the color scheme is identical in that one and the exposition chart, unlike the census atlas. https://archive.org/details/statisticsofnegro00gann/page/24/mode/2up

This shows a front page from Henry Gannett for some reason?

IDK if this one is 'elaboration' -- the literacy one is a lot better, this one is just a kinda confusing palimpsest of two charts of different variables that don't have any relation to each other..

The css here makes the half-page maps larger than the full-page ones… would be nice if they were all defined by a constant height.

empires?

Same note on 'more commonly known' as above.

I think you have to gloss this.

Unlikely that this is worth addressing, but I do find myself wondering what the principles are for First Nations like the Beothuk whose language and sovereignty were irrevocably extinguished.

I don't understand what this refers to.

"now known as"? "now more commonly known as" implies you've given an alternative, doesn't it?

I think this is too much modesty, or a kind of self-undercutting to try to convey the importance of the point. But functionally it undercuts the significance of the earlier parts of the chapter. At the end here I'm understanding the argument as being

1. The antislavery campaign shows what state-of-the-art data visualization meant c. 1800, and these two different visualizations from Clarkson make the case that he should be considered one of the canonical figures.
2. That's important because it heightens a set of ethical and political questions about whether and when to visualize. Clarkson's work can be considered a countervisualization or something -- possibly a concept to introduce ? -- because it's taking advantage of the trade etc. Also highlights dataviz as a political-rhetorical form, not just a scientific practice about astronomy etc.
3. Just because we admire things about Clarkson's career doesn't mean should literally canonize him as a saint. Equiano's reaction shows that even at that time there are a different set of requirements.

And then there is the metaphor of water and streams. This does a few things: 1. provides a counterpoint to the God's-eye, object view by adding a contingency of flow and direction, fluidity, and contingency. 2. was useful for ~1800 readers who ALSO weren't always looking for this objective god's-eye view, which is OK. (I think the infographic/dataviz distinction from the introduction here is useful, because it underlines that the more 'subjective' or whatever flow timelines are an ADVANCE on Priestley's straight lines and can be seen as such. 3. Motivates your own data visualization of the streams of with the also-canonical Mississippi visualization. I may have missed this but I think the connection here is almost fully implicit. This could be one key to motivating the water thing as your own choice.

Seeing some discussion from others here, I think the problem with these two pp is that the metaphor of the river does make sense to modern readers as noted in the paragraph above. The notion of the surging waters of justice is in the "I have a dream speech" too -- Amos's let "justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream".

"Why water" shows up as a motivating question here but it's kind of a red herring: after all you've already opted for the Mississippi analogy above. IDK honestly if it needs to be motivated -- is there any reason not to just say "I've known rivers" and then talk about them?

Almost certainly out of scope, but I find myself wondering about the similarities and differences of the "Description" to the Wedgewood anti-slavery medallion, which also abstracts a single icon of an enslaved person in relief, in an position of submissive victimhood, etc.

Just a note on the (very good!) visualization above; AFAICT you don't compare your diminishing streams to Minard's Napoleonic campaign, but given the importance of Minard in the introduction the comparison will come naturally to many people.

Not precisely the direction you're about to go with "god trick," but maybe worth saying: this is a place where dataviz as enlightenment technology betrays its strength and weaknesses. The idea that any reasonable observer would act in the same way from the same evidence is I believe kind of a tenant of enlightenment thinking, and when applied to government leads to a belief that the primary need of governmental reform is to allow the ruler to see the state of their subjects. (My personal head-citation for this is Jeffrey Freedman, The Poisoned Chalice, 2002, which is definitely not the right citation but does probably have links to the canonical works about why the coffeeshop-crowd thought that the world would be saved if they could just get Frederick the Great to read their newspaper.)

In this view one of the things that's interesting about the diagram is not exactly a "god trick" but -- yes I'm a one-trick pony myself -- a "seeing like a state" trick where the conventional naval form of the shipping plan suddenly includes a part of the design of ships that was always there but previously hidden from the state's view -- its morally shocking cargo.

This sort of repeats the chunk from two above.

I wonder if the Daston and Gallison notion of 'epistemic virtues' helps here in some way.

Oh wow zoom. I thought that would be too much to suggest above! It is too bad that all these effects get lost in mobile views.

This zoom focusing effect here is very nice.

This is a little more complicated than that one, isn't it? Here visualization provides the corrective to data's disembodiment?

There's got to be some way to use position:sticky to keep it this particular thing thing, rather than the second one in the lower right, if you want.

With the previous sentence, this reads a bit as "this project will correct bad work from visualization researchers and assure humanists that they're right about things." You can and should make clearly enunciate form, collaborative authorship, and design of the work here are form of corrective to the practices of humanities scholarship and informed by the practices of researchers and especially practitioners from the visualization fields.

Also I don't exactly know who 'visualization researchers' are.

There's a shift here from first-person-plural authorship to first-person singular.

If this project is really about visualization, I think you should pare this section about data in general down a great deal: potentially to a paragraph which is explicitly about Data Feminism and uses your -- and Jessica Marie Johnson's, et al. -- experience looking at data critically to motivate a specific history of visualization imbued with those lessons.

Going back to Scott's Against the Grain, one of his points is that writing exists solely as an instrument of record-keeping (for the state, and merchants) for centuries before it's used for narrative.

IMO double-entry bookkeeping is not a useful detour in the history of the table… contra 'air of objectivity' I think it's really about auditability and standards of mistrust…

I would probably phrase the 'we will discover' as scoped just to data visualization, whereas the racism of Walker, Galton, Pearson, etc. is known (and citable) scholarship that forces us to ask why data visualization hasn't been forced to be seen in that light.

Needs citation

I'm left opening this image in a new tab to get full-res of the images -- may need to enhance the picture element.

Also not sure about the contrast of 'mesoamerican pictorial devices' with 'European mapmaking techniques' -- European maps of this period are pretty heavy on the images (I always taught Champlaign's map from 1632 for just this) and it seems to assume that there aren't Aztec mapmaking techniques. No idea what they are. Seems to be a book about this merits citation? https://archive.org/details/mappingofnewspai0000mund/page/n5/mode/2up

why "artist"? could be 'scribe', etc.

I don't know if it's worth wading into this whole thing, but if you put the emphasis on any of the three words 'settler-colonial state' you'll get a really different story. The first is kind of James Scott, the public land survey system, etc. The second is maybe the one you're going to tell; it's also more aligned with Francis Kinnahan's take on the census atlases https://www.jstor.org/stable/40068544?read-now=1 which IIRC emphasizes the resource-extractive take towards the West, not their settlability/population.

I sort of want a tiny bit more here about why this map exists -- was someone looking over Shanawdithit's shoulder? Giving her the pen? Where and when did this hit an archive? (and I've absorbed the library-land condemnation of the phrase 'the archive' -- here we're really talking about the archives of settler colonial states, or something.)

I can probably just preliiminary-publish the URL on my project here if you want it… Have also seen people cite -- dear God -- my 2015 AHA paper.

I think the word 'Enlightenment' needs to appear in this paragraph. Like, the traditional story, though not maybe not explicitly enough, treats data visualization as one of the great Enlightenment inventions. And there's some historiographical mainline you can plug into about how great the enlightenment and its inventions really were.

Assuming you mean here 'we' the authors of this project, but there's also an implicit jockeying for authority here (and reflected in the comments) where the 'we' is history/cultural studies. Somewhere (maybe it's coming in the intro) you may need to take up arms and lay out the reasons you (singular or plural) are coming from an extremely different notion of 'scholarship' than Tufte or most IEEE-viz card-carryers.

Yeah, I think the comments here make clear that you need to engage a little more directly with who Tufte is. Possibly deploying critical vocabulary from literary studies -- canon, etc -- I was about to say that his weird fusion of critic and tastemaker is a weird old-fashioned like Matthew Arnold thing, but then I thought maybe like Helen Vendler?

I would probably say 'casualty rate' or something here -- I know nothing about the campaign, but I'd assume that desertions outnumber deaths.

(I've always had a sneaking suspicion that Minard's chart isn't based on solid data, either, but when I tried to go to whatever is generally thought to be his source my French wasn't good enough to tell)

Probably want the z-index higher on the buttons here than the shuffled cards?

This has always been a core project of the digital humanities, and it's worth saying so here.

Climate change should be the incentive for the Digital Humanities to shed the ugly, vestigial industrial apparatus of the academy and embrace new forms of organization.

This sounds like fellowships. Is it fellowships? If there is one thing that we don't need, it's more goddamned fellowships.

redundant with 'concentrated nature... Just:

In particular, given the immense power wielded by monopolistic big tech, our use of their resources should be informed by the ways corporate economic, cultural, and scientific power perpetuates the crisis.

This focuses purely on the effects of new-form digital research. What about the monument to deforestation with oil-based dustcovers that conventional humanists fetishize on the walls of their offices?

This is kind of meek for a manifesto.

We are already in a growing cluster of catastrophes, not "on the brink" of a single one.