Public Keynote RMeS Winter School: Professor Lauren Klein (Emory University)
29 January 2025 | Maastricht University
“The Line Graph and the Slave Ship” returns to the eighteenth-century origins of modern data visualization in order excavate the meaning—and power—of visualizing data. Exploring two examples of early data visualization—the line graphs of British trade data included in William Playfair’s Commercial and Political Atlas (1786) and Description of a Slave Ship (1789) created and circulated by a group of British antislavery activists—this talk will connect Enlightenment theories about visual and statistical knowledge to contemporaneous ideas about personhood and race.