Data during the fact: A review of The Infographic by Murray Dick

Abstract

I first became interested in Joseph Priestley after reading just two and a half pages of ‘Data before the Fact’ by Daniel Rosenberg (an important chapter in a book of important chapters: “Raw Data” is an Oxymoron (2013) edited by Lisa Gitelman). Rosenberg describes his own encounter with Priestley’s 1788 Lectures on History and General Policy in which Priestley uses the word ‘data’ in his text. For me personally, Rosenberg’s descriptions of Priestley’s work to quantify historical figures, their domains, and their achievements was an alluring nod to an early form of statistical bibliography (the predecessor of contemporary bibliometrics). My initial interest in Priestley was to examine this historical work and its influences on Edward Wyndam Hulme and his Tabular Surveys of the divisions in the literature of Architecture and the Textile Industries (published in Hulme, 1923) as sociology of science. Like Rosenberg and so many others before, I was hooked on the earliest forms of data visualization because of their inherent familiarity and the sense that, even without any context for their production, they were ingeniously using data (read: truth) in new and timeless ways. In fact, after my detour I returned to Rosenberg to learn that it was these encounters with Priestley and William Playfair and others who use the word “data” in the eighteenth century that frame Rosenberg’s research journey to explore the history, evolution, semantics, and contexts of the word itself, from the earliest use in 1646 to the twentieth century. Most importantly, the author explores the historical relationship between data, truth, fact, and evidence in the English language, and argues that semantics and historical contexts are of seminal importance to our understanding of “data” as representation of fact. However, “data has no truth . . . This fact is essential to our current usage. It was no less so in the early modern period; but in our age of communication, it is this rhetorical aspect of the term ‘data’ that has made it indispensable” (Rosenberg, 2013, p. 37).