Susan Schulten is Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Denver, where she has taught since 1996. She is the author of A History of America in 100 Maps (2018); Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America (2012), and The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880-1950 (2001), all published by the University of Chicago Press. She is also co-editor of Constructing the American Past: A Sourcebook of a People’s History (Oxford University Press, 2018), and, most recently, author of Emma Willard: Maps of History (2022). Her work has been funded by the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Professor Schulten teaches courses on Civil War and Reconstruction, America at the turn of the century, the history of American ideas and culture, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the Great Depression, the Cold War, war and the presidency, and the methods and philosophy of history.
Georges Hattab is the Visualization Group Leader at the Center for Artificial Intelligence in Public Health Research at the Robert Koch Institute since 2022. He is currently an Adjunct Professor (Privatdozent) at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of the Freie Universität Berlin.
He studied Computer Science, i.e., Bioinformatics, and completed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Paris Diderot University, part of Université de Paris, France. He subsequently started his PhD studies at the Faculty of Technology of the Bielefeld University, Germany. He was supervised by Prof. Tim W. Nattkemper and Prof. Tamara Munzner, and advised by Prof. Martin Ester as part of the German-Canadian DFG International Research Training Group GRK 1906. He obtained his Ph.D. rerum naturalium in 2018. Until 2019, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the field of computational medicine, particularly surgical translational research. His work took place at the National Center for Tumor Diseases, NCT in Dresden and in collaboration with the German Cancer Research Center, DKFZ in Heidelberg, Germany. Afterwards, he led the junior group of Analytics and Visualization at the Philipps-Universität Marburg and headed the Bioinformatics division with the mentorship of Prof. Dominik Heider; where he finished his habilitation thesis in 2021 and obtained the Venia Legendi in 2022. Since 2023, he is an Adjunct Professor (Privatdozent) at the Freie Universität Berlin.
Episode Notes
Susan | Web
https://visualization.group/
https://visionarypress.com/products/etienne-jules-marey-the-graphic-method
Étienne-Jules Marey, The Graphic Method
Related Episodes
Sponsor
Use my special link (https://zen.ai/policyviz12) to save 12% at blendjet.com. The discount will be applied at checkout!
New Ways to Support the Show!
With more than 200 guests and eight seasons of episodes, the PolicyViz Podcast is one of the longest-running data visualization podcasts around. You can support the show by downloading and listening, following the work of my guests, and sharing the show with your networks. I’m grateful to everyone who listens and supports the show, and now I’m offering new exciting ways for you to support the show financially. You can check out the special paid version of my newsletter, receive text messages with special data visualization tips, or go to the simplified Patreon platform. Whichever you choose, you’ll be sure to get great content to your inbox or phone every week!
Transcript
This is Jack Schwabish, and I want to do the ad read for this week’s episode of the PolicyViz podcast. After baseball practice, I’m very hungry, but lucky for me, I use my BlendJet 2 to make a delicious shake. The BlendJet 2 is portable, so you can make a smoothie at home or a protein shake at the gym. It is small enough to fit in a cup holder, but powerful enough to blast through tough ingredients like ice and frozen fruit with ease. It lasts for 15 plus blends and recharges quickly via USB-C. It is whisper quiet, so you can make your morning smoothie without waking up the whole house. Best of all, BlendJet 2 cleans itself, just blend water with a drop of soap, and you’re good to go. What are you waiting for? Go to blendjet.com and grab yours today. Be sure to use the promo code, POLICYVIZ12 to get 12% off your order and free two-day shipping. No other portable blender on the market comes close to the quality, power, and innovation of the BlendJet 2. They’ll guarantee it or your money back. Blend anytime, anywhere with the BlendJet 2 portable blender. Go to blendjet.com and use the code POLICYVIZ12 to get 12% off your order, and free two-day shipping. Shop today and get the best deal ever.
Welcome back to the PolicyViz podcast. I am your host, Jon Schwabish. I hope you’re well, I hope you’re excited for another episode of the show. On this week’s episode of the show, I am joined by two authors in the new series from RJ Andrews, the information graphics visionaries series, and to speak with me, I have – now, if you’re watching this on YouTube, you can see I’m holding up the books now, I’ve got Susan Schulten, author of the new book Emma Willard: Maps of History. And I have Georges Hattab, author of the Graphic Method from Étienne-Jules Marey. That’s my terrible French accent. Both of them join me on the show to talk about their work, researching these two visionaries, collecting the graphs and the maps and the visuals that they need for the book drove these two scholars, and the through line, and the theory and the philosophy that pulls these two visionaries together. And we talk about how these two may not be the names you necessarily identify with the history of data visualization, but are extremely important to the field, and how we can think about how these two scholars, or these two philosophers, or these two designers, or however you’d like to think of them, educators, teachers, engineers, and how their work links to our work today. So I hope you’ll enjoy this week’s episode of the show with Georges and Susan.
Jon Schwabish: Hi, Susan. Georges, welcome to the show, great to see you.
Susan Schulten: Thanks for having me.
Georges Hattab: Hi, Jon, Thanks for the invite.
JS: Yeah, this is very exciting. So I’ve got two of the books of the three on my desk right now. The third one is on Florence Nightingale is around here somewhere. These are lovely. I mean, let’s just talk for a moment before we get into introductions and everything actually. Let’s get into how lovely these books are. I mean, when you got it for the first time, were you just enamored with the feel of the book?
SS: I was, yeah, and I have to tell you that I reread Georges’ book yesterday, and I got a beautiful corner in my afternoon sunlit bedroom, and I just couldn’t stop touching it [inaudible 00:03:30] fingers, especially over the color, and really enjoy the way that the visuals just leapt off the page.
JS: Yeah.
GH: From my side, it’s the same feeling, so the tactile aspect just came off directly after you unwrap the plastic. And since I also had all three books Emma Willard’s poster is actually in my living, I finally was able to find a nice frame for it, and put it up. I think the books hopefully will stand for a long while.
JS: Yeah. So I already got to like core of this, but I wanted to give you both an opportunity to introduce yourself, tell folks who you are, what you’ve done, and then, we’re going to get into these books and what brought you to each of these amazing people in the history of DataViz. So Susan, I thought we’d start with you about who you are, where you come from, and what brought you to this project?
SS: Well, thanks. My name is Susan Schulten. I’m a history professor at the University of Denver. I’ve been here for 27 years, so I’m a bit of an old timer here at DU. And I have long been interested in the history of maps, and also visual culture, so most of the books I’ve written have been about the ways historic maps can open new windows on to the past for us. And in terms of Willard, I distinctly remember the first time I came across her in the late 90s, early 2000s. I was looking at old textbooks and flipping through them, and they are mostly quite literally textbooks, and hers from the 1830s were just leavened throughout with these wonderful illustrations, but more importantly graphics of time; and I was just stunned by them, and I got hooked. And so, I’ve written and thought about Willard for quite a long time, and this was an opportunity to really delve into her graphic legacy.
JS: Right, that’s great. I want to get further into your work on her background and her work, but maybe we’ll turn to Georges first.
GH: Yeah, so I’m George or Georges Hattab, whatever works.
JS: I’ll try the French accent, but I don’t know, it’s just that’s not me.
GH: It’s all right. Yeah, so I’ve been around, currently based in Berlin, and I’m a research group leader at the Robert Koch-Institute, kind of, funny to say, you know, from France, from Paris to [inaudible 00:06:10] I wonder. But it is really nice, and I’m working, and actively actually recruiting between basically creating better abstractions for humans, and to solve data optimization problems. And at the same time, creating better data representations, you know, for lessening the effect of trash in, trash out, when we talk about machine learning. So to put it nicely, that’s how I would. Yeah, so how I came across Marey is a pretty long down history lane, I would say. I have been an undergrad in biochemistry in Paris, and I’ve come across Marey through a book on physiology. And it was actually other researchers that did this in the Marey lab at the time. And from there, I discovered his photography, which is actually I think what he’s most renowned for, color photography. And yeah, since then, I think at some point, RJ posted something on Stack of the Data Visualization Society, and I noticed it and just reached out, and I think it was clear that we shared the passion for Étienne-Jules Marey and took it further.
JS: That’s great. Yeah, so RJ Andrews pulled together this, what I’m going to guess is the first of many books in this historical series. So there’s sort of a difference here, right, because Georges, your book is a translation of Marey’s early work, and Susan, yours is more of a deep dive into Emma Willard. So that is an interesting piece, and I want to get back later today about the kind of intersection, how there’s a common thread between the series. But Susan, I thought we would start with you talking about Emma Willard. You already mentioned her textbooks, but what drew you to her story, what is it about her as an educator, I mean, that was the part to me that really, maybe was a piece that I didn’t know enough about, or just, she was kind of a revolutionary, as it were, like, the education world I really didn’t know about. So I just want to give you some time maybe to give folks a teaser of Willard and her background and what draws you to her story.
SS: She’s a phenomenally complicated and fascinating and deeply flawed and also brilliant person. She’s born in 1787, and I draw attention to that for two reasons. One is, she’s born outside of Hartford, Connecticut to a family. I think she’s the last of 16 children, that is deeply, deeply patriotic. Her father reared her and her siblings to deeply value their American identity. The other reason I draw attention to that is in part because of independence. Emma Willard was part of the first generation of girls to be educated outside the home, and that was a pretty signal experience for her to be educated at these little local schools, some of them more temporary than others. But to really realize when she was among other students, and with what you might call, trained educators, both, what she was capable of, but also the flip side of that is what she considered the deep deficiencies of female education.
So she is one of those first women to be educated outside the home, but that marks her with a sense of just how much better female education could be. And part of the reason Americans know all about her is that she was also the first by the time she’s about 20 to educate women beyond the age of 17 in advanced subjects. So at her Middlebury female academy, one of many schools she runs, she is enraged by what she sees every day when she steps outside her home and sees Middlebury College, which had recently opened, exclusively for men. Advantages of grounds, of faculty, of subject matter, and so, she determines that she will provide something for their female counterparts, their little sisters, if you will. So, Americans know her as the first woman to provide an advanced, what we would say, a college education, so long before Vassar opens or Mount Holyoke, or any of these other places that we know about. She’s doing that kind of university level education on a much smaller scale. Her school still thrives today near Albany, in Troy, and I visited last week and was able to see kind of the legacy of that.
But the part that I really felt like I wanted to contribute to with this book is not just her contribution to female education, but her contribution to visual education. Because, for her, the eye is the only medium of permanent impression, she said that over and over. And she’s like many other people, I suspect, Marey would be similar, or Alexander von Humboldt or William Playfair – all of these folks in the late 18th and early to mid-19th century who believed that a visual language was possible. And so, she doubled down for the rest of her career, beginning in the 20s, with translating ideas, in this case, particularly geography and history, into visual form.
JS: So can you tell me a little bit – so it was actually you said right at the beginning that, at the time, textbooks were literally just text, like, she must have been one of the first to start implementing graphics and maps into her, I mean, we’ll call them textbooks, because that’s what we call them, but implementing them in there?
SS: Yeah. And that’s an accident also of technology, right, as print technology advances. There are some, so it really came home to her when she studied geography, like every other American through Jedidiah Morse’s Geography Made Easy, which had a few images at the very opening of the book, the frontispiece, for instance, or something folded in. But that was a very expensive proposition. And so, she said very distinctly, Morse was good for reading, but bad for study. So in his chapter on maps, he’s literally describing what a map is, right?
JS: Right.
SS: And that made a real impression on her. But she is part of a whole host of folks by the 20s and 30s, as print costs come down, that can make their text much more deeply visual and illustrative.
JS: Yeah. Can you, before we move on to Georges’ book, can you talk a little bit about the types of maps that she created and her technique of creating those maps? Because I think that’s kind of a technological question, right, like, how, in the early part of the 19th century, are you creating these pretty fantastic detailed maps, when you don’t have Google, and you don’t have satellites to do it for you?
SS: Yeah, so a couple of answers on that point. The first is that to the extent that there were maps for schoolchildren at that time, they were usually separate atlases. And so, by the 20s, she’s beginning to publish a little bit in that vein, most of her texts in the 20s have accompanying atlases – so an atlas of ancient geography, an atlas for beginners, an atlas of American history. Partly, what’s interesting to me is that she considers the atlas the main action. In other words, the textbook is the adjunct, as opposed to what we might assume otherwise. And those are pretty big enterprises, they take a long time, they’re fairly expensive. And so, gradually, what she starts to do in the 30s, is also move thematically from what you might call pretty straightforward maps, geographical maps that we would recognize to what she considers to be charts of time. In other words, partly what she’s trying to do is break the boundaries of a map, and allow the map to tell more of a story about time, kind of, in the way that I’m sure Georges can speak to this that Marey was always trying to integrate more than one variable into many of his charts, and that’s part of what was really fascinating to me about Marey. He’s a little bit later than Willard, so he has the benefit of all the innovations that are happening in Europe in terms of cartographic and coronagraphic visuals. But Willard is both accessing less and less expensive techniques for visuals, but also experimenting with more and more capacity for what a graphic can do.
JS: Right. Really interesting. Okay, so I want to come back to a few things because you mentioned Marey, which is a great segue over to Georges – Georges, I’m not going to try to pronounce Marey’s names, because I’ll just butcher it. So can you tell us a little bit about Marey, and then also, you – well, I guess, because it is a translation, but also in your introduction to the book, you talk about his, what I’ll put in quotes, his graphic method, which I don’t know if many people sort of think about placing Marey in sort of the echelon of people who sort of developed a graphic method, so I’m curious about how you might summarize or find his graphic method, but maybe give folks a little bit of a background here about who he was. And then, you can pronounce his first name with the appropriate French accent, because I’m not going to try to do that.
GH: Thanks Jon, it’s all right. So yeah, Étienne-Jules Marey was born in Bordeaux, and this was in the 1830s, so it’s very difficult actually – it was very difficult for me to define Marey. And I was thinking since two-three days now, what is the right word to use to really define him, and I think it’s very difficult to coin such a person. I would say the best way to describe him would be a man of renaissance, because he is a renowned French scientist. He has had, or he had a lot of, how to say, renown awards given to him. He was part of the Collège de France. So there is the need for an introduction there, and he was also a physiologist, he studied medicine. He is a researcher in the way that he also approached certain problems. And then, at the very end, I can say he was also a chronophotographer. And often actually people connect Marey to photography, to the beginning, early times of cinema.
So his work, I think, was significant in the development of cardiology, physical equipment, navigation, even cinematography, and even the science of laboratory photography, which is a very specific field. Of course, there’s a lot to be said about his analyses of motion, and how he went about to characterize them. If I were to be as poetical as him, in the beginning of his book, I would say that Marey as a person was, to some extent, fascinated with how everything actually has or is in motion – the earth we’re on, we as beings, all the other animals, the birds, etc. But away from this more poetical aspect, on these blue dots, in this blackness of space, so to say.
So the method graphic, or the graphic method is a very shortened title of his longer title, which is La méthode graphique dans les sciences expérimentales et principalement en physiologie et en médecine, so the graphical method in the experimental sciences and mainly in physiology and medicine. So why I want to take a minute here to go about the longer title, because we actually translated in this book the very first part of a five parts book, which in the second edition had [inaudible 00:18:53] photography. And so, there is much more to the corpus, so to say that he put together. If I were to be succinct, I would say Marey pioneered the use of graphical recording, and the experimental sciences using many of his instruments, or which actually many of those were his own invention, and he captured and were able to display then the data that was actually impossible to observe with our senses alone, so to say, and this is actually his own introduction, it starts with basically the incongruence or the non-capacity of our senses to deal with such aspects of life or reality, so to say.
And he applied basically these graphical recording methods to problems and physiology using these inscribing instruments or devices to investigate the mechanics, for instance, of a circulatory, respiratory, and muscular systems. And then after 1868, so at the age of 38 years old, he turned to the study of human and animal locomotion. There is another book titled movement, and I think that’s pretty blunt there. But in the second edition in 1885, Marey then added this 51-page supplement on basically the development of the graphic method by the employment or via photography. And there, you can see that over time, he realized that you need the scientific capture with moving to Collodion, for example, plates at the time to capture what actually our eye cannot capture. Even in the book at some point, he describes change blindness without coining the words, because it wasn’t really characterized at the time.
So it’s very difficult to stop talking about Marey, so to say. But I would say that the combination of his work, at least, in medicine, and in the experimental research part was for the mechanical inscription of movements. And he was even trying to, as much as possible with the greatest, so to say, possible accuracy, record was what was matched by his concern for simplifying basically the instruments so that they could be easily also used by clinical diagnosticians or even be made portable, like, for instance, this [inaudible 00:21:43]. So this to me is fascinating, because it was also heavily influenced by the era. I’m not a historian, but I think the industrial era can attest to this heavy influence.
JS: You would call him sort of a renaissance man, which is, I think, clear for anyone who’s read even just the introduction of the book. But I’m curious what would he have called himself – would he have called himself a photographer, a scientist, a graphic designer? He wouldn’t call himself a renaissance man, but like, what was his kind of identification?
GH: I mean, he was a professor of the Collège de France. So you would have to, I guess, address him as Professor Marey if he was living. The way I think he would define himself is an interesting question, and a difficult one. So he was renowned also in different research bubbles including Louis Pasteur. He also even had to comment on cholera at some point relating to public health. I would say that he, in a way, was obsessed with his research, because, I mean, he also had a fallout with, for example, a famous photographer [inaudible 00:23:03]. And I presume that this is also related to his character, but I cannot tell, I have not met the man. And I suppose today, he would say that he would be an engineer, so to say. Engineering solutions trying to miniaturize or make things portable, trying to record things, an engineer to track living, the living pretty much.
JS: Right. Yeah, it’s really interesting how we have changed in such a way there’s so much specialty in certain fields, whereas we look back really not that long, 200 years, 150 years, and people were, across all these different fields, doing all these different innovations. So now that we have sort of this background of these two philosophers, educators, graphic data visualizers, what do you two see as the overlap or the thread that binds them together, because they are – your two books are two of a set of three, or, at least initially, that RJ put together that will, I’m sure he’s working on expanding it, but from your perspective, what is the thread that links them? And maybe, Susan, we can start with you?
SS: I think there’s a couple of ways in which they’re connected. I think one thing is that RJ’s identified these three individuals as folks, kind of, to your earlier question, Jon, that, who we may not necessarily identify as the fathers and mothers of data visualization. So we hear a lot about Minard, we hear so much about Playfair, right? But he was trying a little bit to dig deeper, and to have a more fully original understanding of this, and that’s part of what drew me to this project in the first place. Now, to answer your question about the through line, so something that Georges just said, and really leapt out to me in his book was this concept of innovation that Marey, and certainly Willard before him, were living through an utterly transformative period in terms of technological innovation, particularly around Georges’ second point, which was movement.
So think about someone like Willard, she’s there – this is astonishing to me. She’s living in Troy, when the Erie Canal opens. She has a front row seat to the most transformative transportation technology to date that brings in the entire hinterland, the upper Ohio Valley, Western New York into the orbit of the Hudson, which means New York City. And so, she’s watching this utter collapse of distance, and the collapse of distance has pretty important implications for what time means, and what maps are. And so, when I was listening to Georges, and reading his book, I saw the way that Marey was really trying to reckon with those technological upheavals as well, and other technologies. Right? I think Marey was much more attuned to scientific advances, necessarily, than Willard was. But both of them, I think, are trying to understand, in this new experience of space and time, movement was the word Georges used, how can we help people apprehend different meanings. So that’s one through line. I could go on about Willard specifically, but I’d love to hear Georges thought about others.
GH: Yeah, so I think the part that, I mean, starting with Marey and leaping to Emma Willard, so Marey’s analysis of motion, or, to some extent, well, they are actually characterized by multiple exposures on a single photographic plate, and he is widely considered one of those pioneers of photography, and an influential precursor in the history of cinema. And in this regard, I see, I mean, this is one point of view of seeing Marey’s contribution in terms of innovation for the specific capture of motion with the photographic gun or whatever other means. When we think of the historic era, when we think of both of them, aside from the fact we’re thinking of the American continent, we’re thinking of the European continent, a lot of stuff is happening on both sides. There is a, I would say, a revolutionary aspect to everything actually happening on both continents. And when I think of Emma Willard, I see the person that has been through a lot and had struggled, because, I mean, I don’t imagine myself in that time living, and being able still to move forward, learn more about things, try to actually – actually, I would say she is emancipated. Right? And I would, to some extent, also characterize Marey with that, but it’s been, I don’t know, I mean, the world back then was also quite different. He had also access to the right circles, he had access to, you know, he was at the Collège de France.
So it’s difficult to dare to say that they are comparable in this regard, but for the really long threat, I mean, Nightingale is one stone away, one stone’s throw away from Willard, and then, Marey follows. So this complete era, in my opinion, is just filled with both struggle, which in a sense, is, in a way, also the mother of invention, and it has been, I think, in general, also pushing humanity, and the best of humanity. And in my opinion, these three names, Nightingale, Willard and Marey come as, so to say, plucking the cherries from the tree that is, you know, the history across what could potentially be called the visionary series, which is what RJ adopted. And the reason to this is Marey saw things from a different perspective that others couldn’t at the time.
Willard did things that others didn’t at the time, although there were also limitations of habitat, limitations of being a human being in this specific area, and being able to afford living simply and putting bread on the table.
So, there are lots of these aspects, I think that keep coming. I would even dare to say that they would all three of them compare with Marie Curie. This is my opinion. I mean, they would effectively – they did not, of course, win two Nobel Prizes across two different fields, but they were, to some extent, those people that went to the field that created something, and that were collecting the data, trying to do things to make whatever is happening out there in the field digestible, and to connect with people.
JS: Yeah.
SS: And Jon, there’s an anecdote that might be of particular interest to your listeners, if that’s okay.
JS: Yeah.
SS: Listening to what Georges said, the way he talked about struggle, and Willard having been denied certain things in our education, it really came home to her one day, when she was in Hartford at one of these female schools, where they were teaching her the finer points of needlepoint and painting. She had access on spring break to her cousin’s library, and he had this incredible copy of
Le Brun’s The Passions, which was the most important drawing manual, and she grabbed it off the shelf and excitedly got all her art tools, and started to follow the directions. And what LeBron was most known for was mastering a technique of drawing human emotion, and she realized that she was completely stopped short, because it entirely relied on geometry, and geometry had been denied to her. Advanced mathematics were not available. And for the rest of her life, she realized that visual depth, visual perspective, which was something she was so keenly interested in, in conveying ideas to the human mind, particularly distance of time, that made her so aware, both of the deficiencies of her education and then made her, to Georges’ point, determined to master Euclid.
The point being that it was in part her marginality, which is not to deny her privilege, but to say that she realized so keenly what was lacking in her education, and that was a way to go forward with visual education. So it’s funny how her particular moment in time, in areas that you wouldn’t think would have anything to do with data visualization, became key to her determination to get to that point, which is interesting.
JS: I also think it’s interesting because one of the things that I like to think about when I read these historical accounts is what can we as folks working with data, visualizing data today, what can we learn not just from this let’s, Georges, as you mentioned, like, let’s not just understand that there are a wide array of people, Susan, as you mentioned, other fathers and mothers of the field, but what could we learn from them when we are working in our own day to day, we’re working with our data? And I think one thing I’m picking up from both of you is that there isn’t one skill set, there isn’t one thing to sort of focus on that there’s motion and animation and drawing. And so, I guess, I would turn that back to you, and maybe we’ll start with Georges, like, what do you think readers should take away aside from these, their individual stories and what they did, but what should they maybe take away and try to think about implementing into their own process and into their own work?
GH: I think that’s a really valid and good question. So, in my opinion, what is clear to me across all of this series, and whenever we’re talking of any of these visionaries, the point is passion. So if you’re passionate with something, just carry on, follow it, and see where it takes you. I mean, Marey started with being a physiologist, studied medicine, and then, at some point, took a leap to move into something else. I think that’s the way to go. If you see that you’ve exhausted your current position, you want to do more, you want to learn more, just go for it. I think that’s the bottom line, I would say, for me, if I want to say a short answer.
JS: Yeah. Susan?
SS: I was really struck when I got to visit the Emma Willard school last week, and I showed some of the students at lunch, her techniques because they know she’s a pioneer of female education, but they don’t know about the graphic legacy. I was showing them these wacky visuals, the Temple of Time, or the Tree of Time or the Stream of Time that she was so enamored with her innovations. And some of the student said to me, this is so much like my TikTok feed. And I said, and I was embarrassed, I tried to pretend like I knew what they were talking about, but clearly, within 30 seconds it became clear that I didn’t. And what they were saying was half of their YouTube videos or TikTok feeds that are instructional, meaning teaching them about something, like so many young people now, if they want to learn something, they turn to a podcast like yours, Jon. But they were saying that many of their feeds are explicitly graphic; in other words that in some ways they see Willard’s experimentation, even though some of the graphics are too clever by half, as sort of the antecedent to the just avalanche of visual information that we have today as an instrument.
The other thing I’ll just add, listening to both of you and listening to your question, Jon, is that Willard’s goal always was to create what she called the artificial memory; and all that meant in the 19th century vernacular was memory that didn’t come through your firsthand experience, in other words, memory that had to be generated. And memory was the gold standard for 19th century education, if you wanted to demonstrate mastery, you would have recall. And so, one thing to keep in mind, which is different for Marey, is that everything Willard creates is with the end of helping students memorize something. Whereas Marey, I think of him as just much more – I’ll defer to Georges, but much more of a scientist, right, someone who’s genuinely trying to get to the next level of discovery. And that’s something to keep in mind about, there are slightly different pathways to data visualization.
JS: Right. Absolutely, yeah.
GH: So I’m happy to add a few words also on Marey. So it is important to know that it is the first major treatise on DataViz or data graphics at the time, at least, I would say [inaudible 00:36:48] that was put together. And he was, to some extent, one of the first people to go about describing the abstract geometry that goes behind doing graphics. And in some ways, I think the first part of the book, which we translated, and worked on together, is basically also demonstrating that data visualizations that we create can always be improved. And this is what Marey also demonstrated. He took about or took on the task multiple times to say, okay, this is maybe too much to present, let’s just take a piece of it, or maybe let’s try something new there, for example, for the train connections. So there’s a lot, I would say, that can be made. And already, by looking at this corpus of work, I would say that it’s humbling to see that somebody saw early in time already decided and said to themselves, okay, it’s all right, this doesn’t look very good, maybe I try to do it again. And what is even more amazing is that all of these are hand-drawn. We take sometimes a second, we write a script in R or in Python, and it’s just granted. There have been skills that were needed, I think, to do all of these things, including drawing, which Willard took on, which are granted today. We don’t need to draw things, we don’t need to be very good at writing, we have computers, we have keyboards. So these aspects, I think, also come into picture or into the picture, and add also more value for the world, I would say.
JS: Right. I wish I had delayed that question to end on that, because that’s such a positive affirming sentiment that we ended on, but I did want to ask one other question, which is on the actual building of the two books. Because I’m curious about where, Georges, you talk about in the introduction, where the images come from, so I’m curious on that process – I think listeners are probably interested as well – Susan, maybe we’ll start with you – how did you get the images, what was the process of getting them, like, high enough resolution from 200 years ago that they would look good in a book that is not, A, it’s not small, like just I’m holding up for the listeners, this is not a small book, right? So you can’t just pretend oh it’ll be in a small book, and it’ll be okay, because you can’t really see it. But these are all, both of these are high resolution images. So what was that process like for you, and how did that come about?
SS: It’s interesting, on the one hand, because Willard was such a bestselling author, so the estimate is by the end of her life, there were a million copies of her publications in circulation, so you can get really inexpensively copies of her textbooks. On the other hand, one of the most thrilling things is that during the process of research, I found an unknown variation of her Temple of Time for English history that had been lost to history. So we found it in the Library Company of Philadelphia, thanks to lots of archivists and map dealers who helped us kind of, on a treasure hunt, in trying to figure out where it might be.
So there’s really rare material and really common material. Your main question though is how do you get such wonderful resolution. We have all the credit to these archives, principally the David Rumsey collection at Stanford. So David Rumsey shares RJ and my passion for Willard, and for data graphics generally. And so, they’ve done such incredible work over the years in digitizing her work. But also we drew materials from the American Antiquarian Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, like I mentioned. The Emma Willard School supplied some interior shots of her school, which were really helpful as we tried to reconstruct Willard’s pedagogy. And then also at the last minute I give props to people here on the front range, there’s some wonderful photographers, both at CU Boulder and University of Denver who really got us to the finish line with material that we otherwise couldn’t find. So, for instance, her wonderful textbook on morals for children, which was one of the last things she wrote, as she saw that public schools exploding and all these immigrant kids coming, we want to make sure they understood proper morals that she wasn’t sure were being taught at home. So I hope that answers your question.
JS: No, that’s great, a lot of folks helping in different ways. Georges, what about you, I know, there are not millions of copies of [inaudible 00:41:44] it’s a little bit of a different process.
GH: Oh yes, definitely, you will not be able to find my original filler for any of these prices. It’s a bit of a shame. I actually do have a copy myself and the original, this is to be clearer part of maybe two centimeters thicker than the one that you have, but contains all of the different parts, of course, in French, with some antiquated formulations, so to say. But yeah, so there has been a couple of aspects that I can address. So, for instance, first the images that we took from the original book, and then the extra images that we acquired, we added into the book, because Marey references them, and there is unfortunately no visual in the original Marey. And some of them, we, of course, reworked.
So first for the images, I want to say thanks, first of all, to RJ, because he went about and, well, how do I put this in a nice way, he went about and, of course, opened the second edition of Marey and put it, you know, flattened it, so to say, to take these images with the help of a photographer with high resolution files being then used. The first iteration was to look into these are the crispy details, look into how we can actually improve these images, maybe by using computer vision processing, or certain approaches that could help us, for instance, if the book has a bit of yellowing, increase the contrast when we can without taking it too far. Then we went into a second iteration where we focus on we want to show actually the same equal sized graphic, as it is present in the original, in the printed book, which we ended up successfully doing. And I was doing that yesterday just for the fun of it, okay, that really looks good, and even better than the original, especially with a better quality paper. And actually, the final part was really going on manually, RJ, myself, through the images and working our way through them.
So that’s basically for the images. On the second part for the images we referenced, that Marey also referenced, and we had to hunt down, I think ended up also involving a lot of great folks. Like, for instance, the David Rumsey Map. Of course, this is, to no surprise, holds the key to beautiful photography and pieces, also special thanks to the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the National Library of France, which we also annoyed with some requests and/or about just purchased directly the files which we needed. But along with all of this, I think the niceness of all of this process or the takeaway messages is it was all the time work in progress. And we also came across very beautiful visualizations that we would not have otherwise.
JS: Well, it’s great. The books are a joy to hold. I’m still a physical book reader, so I appreciate having a beautiful book to hold on to and read. So congrats to both of you, they’re great books. I hope folks will read them and think about all the things that we’ve talked about today. So Thanks, Susan. Georges, thanks so much for coming on the show. Great to chat with you.
SS: Thanks, Jon. Can we also just give one shout out to the art director Lorenzo Fanton?
JS: Yes. Okay, so now everyone’s like, wait, the show is over. So tell me a little bit about how that, because this is beyond my experience, so how does that work at the end? Because these are my experience of publishing books is you send the manuscript over to the publisher, and then, they deal with them, they send you some proofs, and then, whatever. But this is much more hands-on for both of you. So what was Lorenzo – what was the process with Lorenzo like?
SS: I was on a call once or twice with him as we tried to think about, both the big picture thing that we were trying to create, like, sort of aesthetically, but also details, but my understanding is that RJ was deep in the weeds with Lorenzo to the extent that Lorenza was in Italy overseeing the printing, and that there were different iterations of the images where he said the color’s not right.
GH: That’s correct…
SS: And making sure that they went back to the drawing board, so that’s my understanding. Go ahead, Georges.
GH: Yes, exactly, just wanted to also echo the mention of Lorenzo, because he did a fantastic job. And as far as I remember as well from RJ, and from the feedback that I received, and from getting on the call once with Lorenzo, he was really meticulous, had a lot of attention on the details, whether the pages are bleeding correctly, is there everything actually being cut correctly, are the colors correct. So all of these aspects completely overwhelming, and I think, big kudos and shout out to him.
JS: Yeah, because there are several spreads in both books that span two facing pages, and so, they are I’ll hold this up for us, for the YouTube watchers like this map in the Marey book, like, it’s not like an image on the left side, and the separate image on the right side. They come together as a single image. And then, in the Willard book, there’s a poster at the end – I don’t know how many people know, it’s kind of tucked in there on the last, on the inside cover at the end, there’s little poster there, so that’s a little, I don’t know, maybe that’s an Easter egg.
SS: The Cracker Jack Prize.
JS: Yeah, that’s just Cracker Jack Prize.
SS: To your question about production, that’s why the book – it actually comes with a sheet of instructions, which is this is a book that’s been sewn, not glued. And so, this is how you relax the pages. And I was so impressed by the level of care that both of them put into this work of art, which is, I don’t know about you, Georges, but when people see it, even before they read it, they just sort of marvel at the quality, which they haven’t held a book like this maybe a long time before.
GH: Exactly.
SS: You are right.
GH: Yes, I mean, I have – I can only just give one more detail, so all those listening, interested and not yet, and have not yet bought the books, either one of them or all of them, you should know that even the books was designed for the books. This is how, to what extent this has been in the works and how it has been prepared. So yeah, it has been done with great care, and I think there’s a lot of time, effort, passion that we also put into the books that actually completely goes across the board for all those that participated.
JS: Yeah, well, kudos to RJ, Lorenzo, all these different folks that you have relied on for all these different pieces, and I’ll put links to all these institutions and places in the show notes so people can check them out. And, of course, the both of you, congrats on these books, they’re great. And again, now we can finish off. Now, I’ll say, thanks again. Thanks again for coming on the show. I appreciate it.
SS: Thank you, Jon.
GH: Thank you, Jon.
And thanks to everyone for tuning into this week’s episode of the show. I just want to let you know that my book, Data Visualization in Excel is set to launch at the end of this week, comes out on May 26. I hope you’ll consider picking up a copy. If you work in Excel, my book will help you create better, more effective and different visualizations, helping you move beyond that standard Excel Insert Chart menu to create a whole range of different and more exciting charts. So I hope you will continue to listen to the show. I hope you’ll rate and review the show wherever you receive and listen to your podcasts. But I hope you’ll just enjoy this episode and more to come. So until next time, this has been the PolicyViz podcast. Thanks so much for listening.
A number of people help bring you the PolicyViz podcast. Music is provided by the NRIs. Audio editing is provided by Ken Skaggs. Design and promotion is created with assistance from Sharon Sotsky Ramirez. And each episode is transcribed by Jenny Transcription Services. If you’d like to help support the podcast, please share it and review it on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. The PolicyViz podcast is ad free and supported by listeners. If you’d like to help support the show financially, please visit our PayPal page or our Patreon page at patreon.com/policyviz.
