2026 Theses Doctoral

Data, Form, and the Future: Graphic Methods in the United States, 1910s–30s

Pivo, Hannah R.

A contribution to the history of data visualization, this dissertation studies early twentieth-century techniques of statistical mapping and graphing, known at the time as ‘graphic methods,’ that were used by U.S. corporate executives, market researchers, federal planners, and population scientists, among others, to anticipate and plan the future. I detail the role of graphic methods in practices of anticipation, expectation, prediction, and forecasting that I collectively label as 'forethinking,' all of which were proving essential to capitalist systems at the time.

Fundamentally interdisciplinary, this project draws on the methods and discourses of art and design history, media history and theory, history of science, and business history to analyze the formal, technical, and epistemic dimensions of graphic methods, as recorded in academic journals, how-to manuals, trade literature, and the archival records of corporations, research institutes, and public agencies. I focus especially on how advocates and practitioners of graphic methods understood and explained their capacities—claiming, for instance, that statistical graphics communicate ‘at a glance.’ Unlike most scholarship on statistical graphics and data visualization, this study is not limited to images that display statistical findings but also addresses how images have been used to conduct statistical analysis in the first place.

Overall, I counter the widely held assumption that statistics is a strictly calculative and rule-based enterprise, arguing instead that early twentieth-century statistics relied heavily upon intuitive assessments of visual form. Further, I contend that the confidence placed in these assessments depended on beliefs inherited from the nineteenth century, namely formalism and historicism. Both terms have many definitions; I refer specifically to a historicism that presumed future developments would follow historical patterns and a formalism that claimed visual form makes immediate, direct, and thus automatically comprehensible impressions on the human mind.

Together, these beliefs made it possible to intuit patterns in past data that were then projected or mapped onto the future. Additionally, the centrality of graphic methods to various administrative arenas means that their study also sheds light on broader historical topics, including corporate management, consumer markets, national planning, and population science.