Title: A Gleam in the Mind's Eye: Some Stories of the Rise of Visual Thinking & Data Visualization

Abstract: This talk gives an overview of some of the content from my current book Data Visualization: A History of Visual Thinking and Graphic Communication (Harvard University Press, 2019?). The general theme is that graphical methods so common today arose largely in conjunction with important scientific and social questions.  Most of the heroes in this history had what we call a "gleam in the mind's eye," an inner vision: an appreciation of the connections among numbers (data) , the idea of evidence for a proposition, and some sort of visual presentation as a means of drawing a conclusion or providing a demonstration. In psychology, we might call this “visual thinking.”

The central questions are: How and why did data visualization arise? What were some key innovations? What cognitive and technological infrastructure was required?  I trace a small portion of this history with a selection of vignettes relating to some of my favorite heroes.