Visible Numbers

Miles A. Kimball is Professor and Department Head of Communication and Rhetoric at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USACharles Kostelnick is Professor of English at Iowa State University, USA.

• Introduction (Charles Kostelnick and Miles A. Kimball)Part 1 Visualizing Bodies: Health, Disease, EvolutionThe shape of things to come: geometric morphometrics, growth, and evolution (Alan Gross)Florence Nightingale's statistical tables for medical care (Lee Brasseur)Visualizing public health: smallpox epidemics, communicating risk, and changing representations of disease rates (Candice A. Welhausen and Rebecca E. Burnett)Part 2 Visualizing Nations: Moral Statistics, War, NationalismMoral statistics and the thematic maps of Joseph Fletcher (Robert Cook and Howard Wainer)Innovation and inertia in statistical mapping in 19th- and 20th-century America (Mark Monmonier)Mountains of wealth, rivers of commerce: Michael G. Mulhall's graphics and the imperial gaze (Miles A. Kimball)'A scheme of cross-roads, orderly and mad': British trench maps of World War I (Marguerite Helmers)Part 3 Examining Visible Numbers: Forms, Methods, HistoriographiesMosaics, culture, and rhetorical resiliency: the convoluted genealogy of a data display genre (Charles Kostelnick)The 20th century computer graphics revolution in statistics (Dianne Cook)The milestones project: a database for the history of data visualization (Michael Friendly, Matthew Sigal, and Derek Harnanansingh)Annotated bibliography of scholarship on the history of data graphics (Kevin Van Winkle)

"The present volume is a collection of ten essays on the subject, mainly written by humanities (especially English) professors. Given this fact, the focus is, as one might expect, on rhetoric and epistemology. (...) those individuals finding the perspective on the subject more in line with their own will be pleased by the 25-page annotated bibliography that is supplied, in addition to the 24 pages of cited works. Summing Up: Recommended."- C. Bauer, York College of Pennsylvania in CHOICE