The Shape of History

Introduction

How it Works

Explore

Imagining Futures

Learn

Updating Interaction

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Shaping
History

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The Shape of History


Reimagining Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s Historical Visualization Work

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Introduction


As media viewers today, accustomed to the charts and graphs of Microsoft Excel, or to the interactive features on The New York Times frontpage, we tend to think that visualizations of data should be clear and intuitive, and yield immediate insight—or, alternately, we look to visualization techniques to help us make sense of the underlying data.


But what would it mean if we took a different view of what visualization could do? What would it mean if a visualization was designed to be difficult and abstract? If it was intended to send us back to the original source of the data in order to make sense of the image we encountered? What if the goal of visualization was to allow each person, individually, to interpret the image for herself?


This was the aim of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, the nineteenth-century writer, editor, and educator. Inspired by a system developed in Poland earlier in the century, she devised a method of translating historical events into shape and color. In her textbook, she explained her desire to appeal to the "mind’s eye" so that each student could create a personal account of the past.

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How it Works

Click the chart to begin.

Explore

Mouse over each event to see its position on the grid.

1. Table of the Sixteenth Century

  • 1. Table of the Sixteenth Century
  • 2. Table of the Seventeenth Century
  • 3. Table of the Eighteenth Century
  • 4. Table of the Nineteenth Century
  • 5. Table of Women's History
  • 6. 100 Days before the 2016 Election

    Palette

    Event Key

    Imagining Futures


    Then, as now, the process of converting text to image was very hard to do. But for Peabody, the difficulty of the process was part of the point. She devised her method at a time of great national crisis—the decade leading up to the Civil War—and she recognized that the nation’s problems would be difficult to resolve. She hoped that by prompting her students to create new narratives of the past, they would also imagine new possible futures.


    Some of her students rose to the challenge, but archival evidence suggests that others resisted the exercise, choosing instead to create patterns that bore no relation to the text. Indeed, it is difficult to resist the desire to employ Peabody's grid as a Modernist canvas, appealing to the imagination through color and form.


    In this way, we see the uses and limits of Peabody’s charts. While they may or may not have prompted a range of interpretations of history, they are most useful today for how they affirm the role of pleasure and the senses, as well as of the individual viewer, in the process of knowledge production.

    Learn

    Click on the color of each event, then plot it on the grid.

    1. Table of the Sixteenth Century

    • 1. Table of the Sixteenth Century
    • 1. Table of the Seventeenth Century
    • 1. Table of the Eighteenth Century
    • 2. Table of the Nineteenth Century
    • 5. Table of Women's History
    • 6. 100 Days before the 2016 Election
    1501.
    Henry VII. grants patent for colonizing America. 
    1
    correct incorrect Show me

    Palette

    Event Key

    Updating Interaction


    Elizabeth Peabody intended her images to be interactive. Along with her history textbook, Peabody sold workbooks of blank charts for student use. She envisioned the exercise as one in which each student would not merely study, but actually create his or her own chart of history.


    In Peabody’s era, this process involved cross-referencing between textbook and workbook— first identifying the type of event and its actors, and then coloring in the corresponding location on the chart. Updating this interaction for the web, we find easy analogues to the original exercise; a color palette presents the six possible colors, and a simple click places the color on the grid.


    But more complex is Peabody’s own sense of how her charts produce knowledge. By emphasizing interaction, she places the source of knowledge in the interplay between viewer, text, and image. Her hope was that, through the act of converting historical account to abstract image and back again, each student would create his or her own narrative of historical change.

    Play

    Click to add your own events to the grid.

    Palette

    Event Key

    Shaping History


    The unfamiliarity of Peabody’s grid is striking in contrast to the familiar form of the timeline. The same history, depicted in timeline form, assumes a comforting legibility: the unfolding of past to present, steadily punctuated by significant events.


    The conversion from grid to timeline is made possible because of Peabody’s own sense of history as a form of data. Although not described as such, Peabody’s atomizing of history into a series of events, each defined by its actors and type, eases the translation of historical event into data object. Once stored as data, this history can be visually represented in any number of different ways.


    Comparing these representations. we become alerted to how the representation of data truly matters. We learn how each visual form reflects a particular sense of the historical record. We also recognize the role of the designer, as well as those who create and clean the data, in shaping the interpretation of history that we see.

    Compare

    Mouse over any event to compare representations.

    CSV Data

      1. Table of the Sixteenth Century

      • 1. Table of the Sixteenth Century
      • 2. Table of the Seventeenth Century
      • 3. Table of the Eighteenth Century
      • 4. Table of the Nineteenth Century
      • 5. Table of Women's History
      • 6. 100 Days before the 2016 Election

        Credits


        "The Shape of History" was conceived by Lauren Klein as part of a larger project on the history of data visualization. The site was designed and prototyped in Spring 2016 by Lauren Klein, Caroline Foster, and Erica Pramer. Adam Hayward and Shivani Negi joined the team in Fall 2016, and worked with Lauren and Caroline to implement the version of the site that you see.

        Fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society and the Library Company of Philadelphia supported the initial archival research for this project.

        A project of the Georgia Tech Digital Humanities Lab.

        About the Site


        "The Shape of History" was built using HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, and makes use of several open-source libraries including jQuery, Bootstrap, D3.js, and two.js. Our code is available on GitHub. Please contact Lauren Klein, lauren.klein@lmc.gatech.edu, with any additional questions or comments.

        A project of the Georgia Tech Digital Humanities Lab.

        Further Reading


        For updates on the project, including information about our interactive full-scale recreation of Peabody’s floor charts, please consult the DH Lab research blog. You can read more about the historical and theoretical framing for the project here. Some additional writing about Elizabeth Peabody’s visualization scheme is available here and here. (Other publications, as well as a detailed bibliography, are in press).

        In addition, Bruce Rhonda’s Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: A Reformer on Her Own Terms (Harvard University Press, 1999) offers a thorough biography of the subject. Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton’s Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010) presents a dazzling survey of the range of visual representations of history, including a substantial section on Peabody. Peabody's original textbook, A Chronological History of the United States (1856), can be found on archive.org.

        A project of the Georgia Tech Digital Humanities Lab.