✏️Murray Dick - Collected Quotes

"Both Nightingale and Farr were concerned in their statistical investigations with uncovering natural laws about human behavior. [...] Nightingale’s polar area diagrams (or exploded pie charts) owe a debt to Playfair’s innovations, but also, no doubt, to her long-term collaborator William Farr, who experimented with circular charts in his earlier publications." (Murray Dick, "The Infographic: A History of Data Graphics in News and Communications", 2020)

"But infographics are not merely representations of data; they coexist with and both influence and are influenced by other visual forms in our modern visual culture." (Murray Dick, "The Infographic: A History of Data Graphics in News and Communications", 2020)

"Infographics belong to the print cultures of late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Britain. They emerged in elite political print media, and were used to communicate useful knowledge to a growing middling sort, during the partisan developmental stage in British journalism history." (Murray Dick, "The Infographic: A History of Data Graphics in News and Communications", 2020)

"Maps can be a metaphor for discovery and for dominion. They embody the same principles of logic, order, and discipline that codify empirical scientific processes." (Murray Dick, "The Infographic: A History of Data Graphics in News and Communications", 2020)

"[...] news infographics are designed to appeal to particular niche audiences within a general mass news audience." (Murray Dick, "The Infographic: A History of Data Graphics in News and Communications", 2020)

"Nightingale’s polar area diagrams play with the metaphorical implications in Playfair’s circle diagrams in a highly effective way. These charts challenge the seeming unity, continuity, and coherence of the phenomena they express. The variation in the scaling of each section implies a sense of discontinuity, but also the same spirit of cartographic empiricism that speaks through the wider statistical maps of the nineteenth century. These forms embolden the viewer with a sense of power, authority, and purpose, to cast a scrutinizing lens over the problem of the social ills of the day. But they also represent discontinuity; things clearly cannot simply go on as they are - change is implicit, change is necessary." (Murray Dick, "The Infographic: A History of Data Graphics in News and Communications", 2020)

"Playfair’s graphical innovations can therefore be said to represent a little discussed, modern journalistic factual technique. Thinking of infographics in this way, as one factual technique among many within the ethical purview of the journalist, represents a helpful way of distinguishing news infographics from the scientific ideal, and crucially, from the scientistic discourse of methodologically objective standards in infographic design." (Murray Dick, "The Infographic: A History of Data Graphics in News and Communications", 2020)

"Priestley’s charts flow like rivers, and Playfair’s (bar) graphs rise like piles of guineas. These earliest visualizations mobilize abstract forms in order to help their audiences better understand abstract entities. Priestley’s charts were concerned with time; Playfair’s graphical forms were broadly concerned with the invisible world of individual psychology, as manifested in economic properties (such as money). These earliest data visualizations were discursively nonrevolutionary in nature. They represent a communicative paradigm for the furtherance of a range of ideas collectively bound up with civilization, and with empire." (Murray Dick, "The Infographic: A History of Data Graphics in News and Communications", 2020)

"Statistical infographics in the publishing culture of the first three quarters of the nineteenth century constitute an improving phase in the history of data visualization. They embody the new methodological spirit of Quetelet’s foundational statistics, and were a tool of progressive reform." (Murray Dick, "The Infographic: A History of Data Graphics in News and Communications", 2020)

"The scientistic data visualization draws on the classical abstract forms, deals (often) in abstract phenomena, and is stripped of any visual allure. In these forms, the discursive emphasis is on methodology, while pragmatic, ideological, and aesthetic aspects of data display are collectively de-emphasized." (Murray Dick, "The Infographic: A History of Data Graphics in News and Communications", 2020)