The Shape of History

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.

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.

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.