Primary Source Data Visualizations Ready for Slow Reveal

In 1858, nurse, statistician, and healthcare reformer Florence Nightingale published Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army. Founded Chiefly on the Experience of the Late War. Presented by Request to the Secretary of State for War. Among several data visualizations was this one, now known as the Nightingale Rose Diagram. It was used by Nightingale to demonstrate that epidemic disease, which was responsible for more British deaths in the course of the Crimean War than battlefield wounds, could be controlled by better sanitation, nutrition, ventilation, and shelter. An image of the original can be found at:  https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Nightingale-mortality.jpg 

Created by Charles Minard in 1869 to tell a story of the losses of Napoleon’s troops on their 1812 march to Moscow, this data visualization is regarded as one of the greatest data visualizations of all time. It consists of six variables: the size, location, distance, and direction of the army, dates of travel on the return trip, and changing temperatures on the return trip. The visualization shows how disastrous the trip was, largely because of the great distance traveled in subzero temperatures. The size of the army was 422,000 men at the beginning of the trip and by the time the army completed the march, fewer than 10,000 men remained. One version of the original hand-drawn data visualization can be found here: https://www.nealvonflue.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Minard-napolean-chart3.jpg  

Henry Gannett (1846-1914) served as geographer of the U.S. censuses of 1880, 1890, and 1900 and was a driving force behind the Statistical Atlases of the United States from those same years. This collection comes from the Statistical Atlas from the 1890 census. The 1890 census included a greater number of topics than any previous census and more than would be included in those immediately following. New entries on the census questionnaire included items about ownership and indebtedness of farms and homes; information about surviving Union soldiers, and the names of the Civil War widows. "Japanese" was also added as a racial category, along with "Chinese," "Negro," "mulatto," "quadroon," "octoroon," and "white."

This document, written by Henry Gannett and published in 1894, was funded by the John F. Slater Fund. The Slater Fund was an endowment established  in 1882 by Slater for education of African Americans in the southern states. The preface to the document states that the Fund would "publish from time to time papers that relate to the education of the colored race. " Henry Gannett, who wrote the report, was a geographer for the U.S. Censuses of 1880, 1890, and 1900 and a driving force behind the data visualizations in the Statistical Atlases of the United States. The report is valuable for the statistics and data visualizations it provides, but is also laden with language reflecting the racist views of the time. 

The 1900 Paris Exposition was a world’s fair held in Paris, France, April 15-November 12, 1900. It was intended to highlight accomplishments over the past century and to encourage people to look forward to what was to come in the 20th century. One building at the fair was devoted to the “social economy,” and the U.S. section featured an exhibit devoted to the history and “present conditions” of African Americans. Scholar, writer, and civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois was asked to contribute a social study about African American life to the exhibit. Within the display were 63 charts, graphs, and maps, visualizing data mostly from the U.S. Census, Atlanta University reports, and various government agencies such as the U.S. Bureau of Labor. This section contains recreated data visualizations featured in the exhibit.  

Henry Gannett and W.E.B DuBois, both of whom are featured separately on this page, used data from the U.S. Census of 1890 to create their data visualizations, but had different stories to tell with the data and different reasons for telling stories with data. This section has slides juxtaposing several data visualizations created under the direction of the two men, offering opportunities for students to consider questions about authorship and purpose, as well as explore how data can be displayed in different ways to tell different stories.