From Writing Lives to Scaling Lives in Joseph Priestley's Chart of Biography

Abstract

Abstract: Joseph Priestley is often credited with the invention of the timeline for representing past lives and events, mainly in the Chart of Biography (1765) and Chart of History (1769). These efforts place Priestley squarely within the history of data visualization. This article argues that we should also consider Priestley's Chart of Biography as part of the history of biography or life writing, particularly because Priestley's A Description of a Chart of Biography , a written account of the Chart 's purpose and methodology, accompanied the Chart itself. Toward that end, this article tracks the similarities between the epistemological and methodological aims of biographers such as Samuel Johnson and those of Priestley in his effort to represent lives "without the intervention of words," as he put it. In so doing, this article also identifies Priestley's contributions to the long history of the concept of data, from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century usages of the term to the formation of the modern "data subject," the representation of a person as an aggregation of available data about them.