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Historical Data Visualization with authors Georges Hattab and Susan Schulten
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On this week's episode of the PolicyViz podcast, I chat with Susan Schulten and Georges Hattab, authors of the new books on dataviz luminaries Emma Willard and Etienne-Jules Marey. We talk about these two creators and their impacts on the data visualization field today.
Susan Schulten is Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Denver, where she has taught since 1996. Georges Hattab is the Visualization Group Leader at the Center for Artificial Intelligence in Public Health Research at the Robert Koch Institute since 2022.
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Transcript
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Authors Discuss Information Graphics Visionaries Series
00:01:16
Speaker
Welcome back to the PolicyViz podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. I hope you're well. I hope you're excited for another episode of the show. On this week's episode of the show, I am joined by two authors in the new series from RJ Andrews, the Information Graphics Visionaries series. And to speak with me, I have
00:01:36
Speaker
Now, if you're watching this on YouTube, you can see I'm holding up the books now. I've got Susan Shoulton, author of the new book, Emma Willard, Maps of History. And I have Georges Hetab, author of The Graphic Method from Etienne Jules Moret. That's my terrible French accent. Both of them join me on the show to talk about their work.
00:01:55
Speaker
researching these two visionaries, collecting the graphs and the maps and the visuals that they need for the book for these two scholars, and the through line and the theory and the philosophy that pulls these two visionaries together. And we talk about how these two may not be the names you necessarily identify with the history of data visualization, but are extremely important to the field.
00:02:22
Speaker
and how we can think about how these two scholars or these two philosophers or these two designers, however you'd like to think of them, educators, teachers, engineers, and how their work links to our work today. So I hope you'll enjoy this week's episode of the show with George and Susan. Hi, Susan. George, welcome to the show. Great to see you. Thanks for having me. Hi, John. Thanks for the input.
00:02:51
Speaker
Yeah, this is very exciting. So I've got two of the books of the three on my desk right now. The third one is on Florence Nightingale's around here somewhere. These are lovely. I mean, let's just talk for a moment before we get into introductions and everything, actually. Let's get into how lovely these books are. I mean, when you got it for the first time, were you like just enamored with the feel of the book?
00:03:18
Speaker
I was, yeah. And I have to tell you that I reread Georgia's book yesterday. And I got a beautiful corner in my afternoon senlet bedroom and I just couldn't stop touching it. Especially over the color and really enjoy the way that the visuals just leapt off the page.
00:03:37
Speaker
Yeah. From my side, it's the same feeling. So the tactile aspect just came off directly after you unwrap the plastic. And since I also had all three books, Emma Willard's poster is actually in my living. Finally was able to find a nice frame for it and put it up. I think the books hopefully will stand for a long while.
00:04:06
Speaker
Yeah. So I already got to the core of this, but I wanted to give you both an opportunity to introduce yourselves, tell folks who you are, what you've done, and then we're going to get into these books and what brought you to each of these amazing people in the history of Dataviz. So, Susan, I thought we'd start with you about who you are, where you come from, and what brought you to this
Susan Schoulton on Historic Maps and Emma Willard
00:04:30
Speaker
project.
00:04:30
Speaker
Well, thanks. My name is Susan Schulten. I'm a history professor at the University of Denver. I've been here for 27 years, so I'm a bit of an old-timer here at DU. And I have long been interested in the history of maps and also visual culture. So most of the books I've written have been about the ways historic maps can open new windows onto the past for us.
00:04:55
Speaker
And in terms of Willard, I distinctly remember the first time I came across her in the late 90s, early 2000s, I was looking at old textbooks and flipping through them. And they are mostly quite literally textbooks. And hers from the 1830s were just leavened throughout with these wonderful illustrations, but more importantly, graphics of time. And I was just stunned by them and I got hooked. And so I've written,
00:05:24
Speaker
and thought about Willard for quite a long time. And this was an opportunity to really delve into her graphic legacy. Great. Well, that's great. I want to get further into your work on her background and her work, but maybe we'll turn to Georges first. Yeah. So I'm Georges, or George, at Georges Centre. I'll try. I'll try the French accent, but I don't know. It's not.
00:05:54
Speaker
It's all right. So, yeah, so I've been around, currently based in Berlin, and I'm a research group leader at the Robert Koch Institute. Kind of funny to say, you know, from France, from Paris to the Robert Koch, I wonder. But it is really nice. And I'm working and actively actually recruiting
00:06:21
Speaker
between basically creating better abstractions for humans and to solve data visualization problems, and at the same time creating better data representations, you know, for lessening the effect of trash in, trash out when we talk about machine learning. So to put it nicely, that's how I would.
00:06:42
Speaker
Yeah, so how I came across Marais is a pretty long town history lane, I would say. I have been an undergrad in biochemistry in Paris, and I've come across Marais through a book on physiology.
00:06:59
Speaker
and it was actually other researchers that did this in the Maré lab at the time and from there I discovered his photography which is actually I think what is most renowned for chronophotography and yeah since then I think at some point
00:07:20
Speaker
RJ posted something on the stack of the data visualization society and I noticed it and just reached out and I think it was clear that we shared the passion for Etienne Junmai and took it further.
00:07:40
Speaker
That's great. Yeah. So, so RJ Andrews pulled together this, this, what I'm going to guess is the first of many books in this historical series. So there's sort of a difference here, right? Because George, your book is a translation of Moray's early work and Susan, yours is
00:08:01
Speaker
more of a deep dive into Emma Willard. That is an interesting piece. I want to get back later today about the intersection, how there's a common thread between the series. Susan, I thought we would start with you talking about Emma Willard. You already mentioned her textbooks. What drew you to her story? What is it about her as an educator? That was the part to me that really
00:08:30
Speaker
Maybe it was a piece that I didn't know enough about or just she was kind of a revolutionary as it were in like the education world that I really didn't know about. So I just want to give you some time maybe to give folks the teaser of Willard and her background and what draws you to her story. She's a phenomenally complicated and fascinating and deeply
00:08:50
Speaker
flawed and also brilliant person.
Georges Hetab on Marey's Innovations in Visualization
00:08:53
Speaker
She's born in 1787, and I draw attention to that for two reasons. One is she's born outside of Hartford, Connecticut to a family, I think she's the last of 16 children, that is deeply, deeply patriotic. Her father reared her and her siblings to deeply value their American identity. The other reason I draw attention to that is in part because of independence,
00:09:19
Speaker
Emma Willard was part of the first generation of girls to be educated outside the home. And that was a pretty signal experience for her to be educated at these little local schools, some of them more temporary than others, but to really realize when she was among other students and with what you might call trained educators, both what she was capable of, but also the flip side of that is what she considered the deep deficiencies of female education.
00:09:47
Speaker
She is one of those first women to be educated outside the home, but that marks her with the sense of just how much better female education could be. Part of the reason Americans know about her is that she was also the first, by the time she's about 20, to educate women beyond the age of 17 in advanced subjects. At her Middlebury Female Academy, one of many schools she runs,
00:10:15
Speaker
She is enraged by what she sees every day when she steps outside her home and sees Middlebury College, which had recently opened exclusively for men, advantages of grounds, of faculty, of subject matter. And so she determines that she will provide something for their female counterparts, their little sisters, if you will.
00:10:35
Speaker
So Americans know her as the first woman to provide an advanced, what we would say, a college education. So long before Vassar opens or Mount Holyoke or any of these other places that we know about, she's doing that kind of university level education on a much smaller scale. Her school still thrives today near Albany in Troy. And I visited last week and was able to see kind of the legacy of that.
00:11:02
Speaker
But the part that I really felt like I wanted to contribute to with this book is not just her contribution to female education, but her contribution to visual education. Because for her, the eye is the only medium of permanent impression. She said that over and over. And she's like many other people, I suspect Marie would be similar, or Alexander von Humboldt, or William Playfair, all of these folks in the late 18th and early to mid 19th century who believed that a visual
00:11:32
Speaker
language was possible. And so she doubled down for the rest of her career, beginning in the 20s with translating ideas, in this case, particularly geography and history into visual form. So can you tell me a little bit, so it was interesting, you said right at the beginning that at the time textbooks were literally just text, like was she, she must have been one of the first to start implementing graphics and maps into her
00:12:01
Speaker
I mean, we'll call them textbooks because that's what we call them, but implementing them in there. Yeah. And that's a that's an accident also of technology, right? As as print technology advances, there are some. So it really came home to her when she studied geography like every other American through Jedidiah Morse's geography made easy.
00:12:20
Speaker
which had a few images at the very opening of the book, the frontispiece, for instance, or something folded in. But that was a very expensive proposition. And so she said very distinctly, Morse was good for reading, but bad for study. So in his chapter on maps, he's literally describing what a map is, right? And that made a real impression on her. But
00:12:45
Speaker
She is part of a whole host of folks by the 20s and 30s as print costs come down that can make their text much more deeply visual and illustrative.
00:12:55
Speaker
Yeah.
Shared Themes of Innovation and Education
00:12:57
Speaker
Can you, before we move on to George's book, can you talk a little bit about the types of maps that she created and her technique of creating those maps? Because I think that's a kind of a technological question, right? Like how in the early part of the 19th century are you creating these pretty fantastic detailed maps when you don't have Google and you don't have satellites to do it for you?
00:13:24
Speaker
Yeah, so a couple answers on that point. The first is that to the extent that there were maps for school children at that time, they were usually separate atlases. And so by the 20s, she's beginning to publish a little bit in that vein. Most of her texts in the 20s have accompanying atlases.
00:13:43
Speaker
So an atlas of ancient geography, an atlas for beginners, an atlas of American history. Partly what's interesting to me is that she considers the atlas the main action. In other words, the textbook is the adjunct as opposed to what we might assume otherwise. And those are pretty big enterprises. They take a long time. They're fairly expensive.
00:14:07
Speaker
And so gradually what she starts to do in the 30s is also move thematically from what you might call pretty straightforward maps, geographical maps that we would recognize to what she considers to be charts of time. In other words, partly what she's trying to do is break the boundaries of a map and allow the map to tell more
00:14:31
Speaker
of a story about time, kind of in the way that I'm sure George can speak to this, that Murray was always trying to integrate more than one variable right into many of his charts. And that's part of what was really fascinating to me about Murray. He's a little bit later than Willard, right? So he has the benefit of all the innovations that are happening in Europe in terms of
00:14:52
Speaker
cartographic and chronographic visuals. But Willard is both accessing less and less expensive techniques for visuals, but also experimenting with more and more capacity for what a graphic can do. Right. Really interesting. Okay, so I want to come back to a few things because you mentioned Mireille, which is a great segue over to George. George, I'm not even going to try to pronounce
00:15:17
Speaker
Moray's names, because I'll just butcher it. So can you tell us a little bit about Moray? And then also, well, I guess because it is a translation, but also in your introduction to the book, you talk about what I'll put in quotes, his graphic method, which I don't know if many people sort of think about
00:15:40
Speaker
placing Moray in sort of the echelon of people who sort of developed a graphic method. So I'm curious about how you might summarize or define his graphic method, but maybe give folks a little bit of a background here about who he was. And then you can pronounce his first name with the appropriate French accent, because I'm not going to try to do that.
00:16:00
Speaker
Thanks, John, it's all right. Etienne Jude Marais was born in Bonn in Bordeaux, and this was in the 1830s. It was very difficult for me to define Marais, and I was thinking since two or three days now, what is the right word to use to really define him? I think it's very difficult to coin such a person,
00:16:28
Speaker
I would say the best way to describe him would be a man of Renaissance, because he is a renowned French scientist. He has had a lot of, I would say, renowned awards given to him. He was part of the College de France.
00:16:49
Speaker
There is the need for an introduction there, and he was also a physiologist. He studied medicine. He is a researcher in the way that he also approached certain problems. And then at the very end, I can say he was also a chronophotographer. And often, actually, people
00:17:09
Speaker
connect Marie to photography to the, you know, beginning early times of cinema. So his work, I think, was significant in the development of cardiology, physical equipment, aviation, even cinematography and even the science of
00:17:27
Speaker
laboratory photography, which is, you know, a very specific field. Of course, there is a lot to be said about his analyses of motion and how he went about to characterize them. If I were to be as poetical as him in the beginning of his book, I would say that Marie, as a person, was to some extent
00:17:53
Speaker
fascinated with how everything actually has or is in motion the earth we're on we as beings all the other you know animals the birds etc so but away from this more poetical aspect you know on this
00:18:12
Speaker
blue dots in the slackness of space, so to say. So the method graphic or the graphic method is a very shortened title of his longer title, which is a le method graphic, ton les science experimentals et pranciplement en physiologie et en medicine.
00:18:33
Speaker
So the graphical method in the experimental sciences and mainly in physiology and medicine. So why I want to take a minute here to go about the longer title, because we actually translated in this book the very first part of a five parts book, which in a second edition had an annex for photography.
00:18:56
Speaker
And so there is much more to the corpus, so to say, that he put together. If I were to be succinct, I would say Maré pioneered the use of graphical recording in the experimental sciences.
00:19:13
Speaker
using many of his instruments or which actually many of those were his own invention and he captured and were able to display then the data that was actually impossible to observe with our senses alone so to say and this is actually his own introduction starts with basically the incongruence or the
00:19:38
Speaker
non-capacity of our senses to deal with such aspects of, you know, life or reality, so to say. And he applied basically this graphical recording methods to problems in physiology using these inscribing instruments or devices.
00:19:57
Speaker
to investigate the mechanics, for instance, of the circulatory, respiratory, and muscular systems. And then after 1868, so at the age of 38 years old, he turned to the study of human and animal locomotion. There is another book titled Movement. I think that's pretty blunt there.
00:20:22
Speaker
But in the second edition in 1885, Marais then added this 51-page supplement on basically, you know, the development of the graphic method by the employment or via photography. And there you can see that over time you realized that you need the scientific
00:20:45
Speaker
capture with you know moving to colloidal for example plates at the time to capture what actually our eye cannot capture even in the book at some point he describes change blindness without coining the words because it wasn't really characterized at the time yeah um yeah so it's very difficult to stop talking about mare so to say um
00:21:11
Speaker
But I would say that the combination of his work, at least in medicine and in the experimental research part, was for the mechanical inscription of movements.
00:21:21
Speaker
And he was even trying to, as much as possible, with the greatest, so to say, possible accuracy, record what was matched by his concern for simplifying basically the instruments so that they could be easily also used by clinical diagnosticians or even be made portable, like for instance this FIMO graph.
00:21:44
Speaker
So this to me is fascinating because it was also heavily influenced by the era. I'm not a historian, but I think the industrial era can attest to this heavy influence. You would call him sort of a Renaissance man, which is, I think, clear for anyone who's read even just the introduction of the book. But I'm curious, what would he have called himself? Would he have called himself a photographer, a scientist, a graphic designer?
00:22:12
Speaker
He wouldn't call himself a Renaissance man, but like what was his kind of identification? I mean, he was a professor at the College de France, so you would have to address him with Professor Marais if he was living. The way I think he would define himself is an interesting question and a difficult one. So he was renowned also in different
00:22:38
Speaker
research bubbles, including Louis Pasteur. He also even had a comment on cholera at some point relating to public health. I would say that he, in a way, was obsessed with his research, because, I mean, he also had a fallout with, for example, a famous photographer, Demini,
00:23:05
Speaker
And I presume that this is also related to his character. But I cannot tell. I have not met the man. And I suppose today he would say that he would be an engineer, so to say. Engineering solutions, trying to miniaturize or make things portable, trying to record things. Yeah, an engineer to track
00:23:30
Speaker
living the living pretty much. That's right. Yeah. It's really interesting how we have changed in such a way. There's so much specialty and in certain fields, whereas, you know, we look back, you know, really not that long, 200 years, 150 years, and people were, you know, across all these different fields, doing all these, all these different, uh, innovations.
Historical Impact of Willard and Marey
00:23:53
Speaker
So now that we have sort of this background of, of these two, um,
00:23:59
Speaker
philosophers, educators, graphic data visualizers. What do you two see as the overlap or the thread that binds them together? Because they are, your two books are two of a set of three, or at least initially, that RJ put together that will, I'm sure he's working on expanding it. But from your perspective, what is the thread that links them? And maybe Susan, we can start with you.
00:24:28
Speaker
I think there's a couple ways in which they're connected. I think one thing is that RJ identified these three individuals as folks
00:24:38
Speaker
Kind of to your earlier question, John, who we may not necessarily identify as the fathers and mothers of data visualization. So we hear a lot about Menard. We hear so much about Playfair, right? But he was trying a little bit to dig deeper and to have a more fully original understanding of this. And that's part of what drew me to this project in the first place. Now, to answer your question about the through line, so something that
00:25:06
Speaker
George just said and really leapt out to me in his book was this concept of innovation that Murray and certainly Willard before him were living through an utterly transformative period in terms of technological innovation, particularly around George's second point, which was movement. So think about someone like Willard, right? She's there. This is astonishing to me. She's living in Troy when the Erie Canal opens. She has a front row seat to the most transformative
00:25:36
Speaker
transportation technology to date that brings in the entire hinterland, the Upper Ohio Valley, Western New York, into the orbit of the Hudson, which means New York City. And so she's watching this utter collapse of distance. And the collapse of distance has pretty important implications for what time means, right?
00:25:55
Speaker
and what maps are. And so when I was listening to Georges and reading his book, I saw the way that Murray was really trying to reckon with those technological upheavals as well and other technologies, right? I think Murray was much more attuned to scientific advances necessarily than Willard was. But both of them, I think, are trying to understand in this new experience of space and time
00:26:21
Speaker
movement was the word Georges used. How can we help people apprehend different meanings? So that's one through line. I could go on about Willard specifically, but I'd love to hear Georges thought about others. Yeah, so I think the part that I mean, the starting with Marie and leaping to Emma Willard. So Marie's analysis of motion are to some extent
00:26:50
Speaker
Well, they are actually characterized by multiple exposures on a single photographic plate. And he is widely considered one of those pioneers of photography and an influential precursor in the history of cinema. And in this regard, I see, I mean, this is one point of view of seeing Maria's contribution in terms of innovation for the specific capture of motion.
00:27:17
Speaker
with this photographic gun or whatever other means. When we think of the historic era, when we think of both of them, aside from the fact we're thinking of the American continent, we're thinking of the European continent, a lot of stuff is happening on both sides. There is, I would say, a revolutionary aspect to everything actually happening on both continents.
00:27:48
Speaker
And when I think of Emma Willard, I see a person that has been through a lot and had struggled because, I mean, I don't imagine myself in that time living and being able still to move forward, learn more about things, try to actually, actually, I would say she is emancipated, right?
00:28:14
Speaker
I would to some extent also characterize Maré with that, but I don't know. I mean, the world back then was also quite different. He had also access to the right circles. He had access to
00:28:28
Speaker
you know, he was of the Collège de France. So they are, it's difficult there to say that they are comparable in this regard, but for the really long threads. I mean, 19 Yale is one stone away, one stone throw away from Willard, and then Marie follows. And so this complete era, in my opinion, is just
00:28:50
Speaker
filled with both struggle which in its sense is in a way also the mother of invention and it has been I think in general also pushing humanity and the best of humanity and in my opinion these three names Nightingale, Willard and Mare come as so to say plucking the cherries from the tree that is you know the history
00:29:18
Speaker
across what could potentially be called the visionary series, which was RJ, you know, tapped it. And the reason to this is, Marie saw things from a different perspective that others couldn't at the time. Willard did things that others didn't at the time, although there were also limitations, you know, of the habitat limitations of
00:29:44
Speaker
being a human being in this specific area and being able to afford living simply or putting a pen on the table. So there are lots of these aspects, I think, that keep coming. I would even
00:29:58
Speaker
dare to say that they would all, three of them, compare with Marie Curie. This is my opinion. I mean, they would effectively, they did not, of course, win two Nobel Prizes across two different fields, but they were to some extent those people that went to the field that created something and that were, you know, collecting the data, trying to do things to make whatever is happening out there in the field digestible.
00:30:27
Speaker
and to connect with people. Yeah. And John, there's an anecdote that might be of particular interest to your listeners if I, if you, that's okay. Listening to what George just said, the way he talked about struggle and Willard having been denied certain things in her education, it really came home to her one day when she was in Hartford at one of these female schools, you know, where they were teaching her
00:30:54
Speaker
the finer points of needlepoint and painting. She had access on spring break to her cousin's library. And he had this incredible copy of LeBron's The Passions, which was the most important drawing manual. And she grabbed it off the shelf and excitedly got all her art tools and started to follow the directions. And what LeBron was most known for was mastering a technique of drawing human emotion.
00:31:22
Speaker
And she realized that she was completely stopped short because it entirely relied on geometry. And geometry had been denied to her. Advanced mathematics were not available. And for the rest of her life, she realized that visual depth, visual perspective, which was something she was so keenly interested in, in conveying ideas to the human mind, particularly distance of time.
00:31:50
Speaker
that made her so aware both of the deficiencies of her education and then made her, to Georgia's point, determined to master Euclid. The point being that it was in part her marginality, which is not to deny her privilege, but to say that she realized so keenly what was lacking in her education, and that was a way
00:32:13
Speaker
to go forward with visual education. So it's funny how her particular moment in time in areas that you wouldn't think would have anything to do with data visualization became key to her determination to get to that point, which is sort of interesting.
00:32:28
Speaker
I also think it's interesting because one of the things that I like to think about when I read these historical accounts is what can we as folks working with data, visualizing data today, what can we learn not just from this let's, George, as you mentioned, like let's not just understand that there are a wider array of people, Susan, as you mentioned, other fathers and mothers of the field, but what can we learn from them when we are working in our own
Lessons for Modern Data Professionals
00:32:58
Speaker
day-to-day when we're working with our data. And I think one thing I'm picking out from both of you is that there isn't one skill set, there isn't one thing to sort of focus on that there's motion and animation and drawing. And so I guess I would turn that back to you and maybe we'll start with Georges.
00:33:20
Speaker
What do you think readers should take away, aside from their individual stories and what they did, but what should they maybe take away and try to think about implementing into their own process, into their own work?
00:33:33
Speaker
I think that's a really valid and good question. So in my opinion, what is clear to me across all of this series, and whenever we're talking of any of these visionaries, the point is passion. So if you're passionate but with something, just carry on, follow it, and see where it takes you. I mean, Marie started with being a physiologist, studied medicine, and then at some point took a leap to move into something else.
00:34:03
Speaker
I think that's the way to go. If you see that you've exhausted your current position, you want to do more, you want to learn more, just go for it. I think that's the bottom line, I would say for me, if I want to say a short answer. Yeah. Susan?
00:34:27
Speaker
really struck when I got to visit the Emma Willard School last week and I showed some of the students at lunch her techniques because they know she's a pioneer female education but they don't know about the graphic legacy. I was showing them these wacky visuals, the temple of time or the tree of time or the stream of time that she was so enamored with her innovations
00:34:49
Speaker
And some of the students said to me, this is so much like my TikTok feed. And I said, and I was embarrassed. I tried to pretend like I knew what they were talking about. Pretty clearly within like 30 seconds, it became clear that I didn't. And what they were saying was half of their YouTube videos or TikTok feeds that are instructional, meaning teaching them about something, like so many young people now, if they want to learn something.
00:35:14
Speaker
They turned to a podcast like yours, John. But they were saying that many of their feeds are explicitly graphic. In other words, in some ways, they see Willard's experimentation, even though some of the graphics are too clever by half, as sort of the antecedent to the just avalanche of visual information that we have today as an instrument. The other thing I'll just add listening to both of you and listening to your question, John, is that
00:35:42
Speaker
Willard's goal always was to create what she called the artificial memory. And all that meant in the 19th century vernacular was memory that didn't come through your firsthand experience. In other words, memory that had to be generated. And memory was the gold standard for 19th century education. If you wanted to demonstrate mastery, you would have recall. And so one thing to keep in mind, which is different from Ray,
00:36:08
Speaker
is that everything Willard creates is with the end of helping students memorize something.
00:36:14
Speaker
Whereas, Murray, I think of him as just much more, I'll defer to George, but much more of a scientist, someone who's genuinely trying to get to the next level of discovery. That's something to keep in mind about there's slightly different pathways to data visualization. I'm happy to add a few words also on Murray.
00:36:39
Speaker
It is important to know that it is the first major treaties on Dataverse that were data graphics at the time, at least I would say like that, that was put together. And he was to some extent one of the first people to go about describing the abstract geometry that goes behind
00:36:59
Speaker
doing graphics and in some ways I think the first part of the book which we translated and worked on together is
00:37:12
Speaker
basically also demonstrating that data visualizations that we create can always be improved. And this is what Marie also demonstrated. He took about or took on the task multiple times to say, okay, this is maybe too much to present. Let's just take a piece of it.
00:37:31
Speaker
Or maybe let's try something new there, for example, for the train connections. So there's a lot, I would say, that can be made and already by looking at this corpus of work,
00:37:46
Speaker
I would say that it's humbling to see that somebody so early in time already decided and said to himself, OK, it's all right. This doesn't look very good. Maybe I try to do it again. And what is even more amazing is that all of these are hand drawn. We take sometimes a second. We write a script in R or in Python.
00:38:06
Speaker
And it's just granted. There have been skills that were needed, I think, to do all of these things, including drawing, which Willard took on, which are granted today. We don't need to draw things. We don't need to be very good at writing. We have computers. We have keyboards. So these aspects, I think, also come into picture or into the picture and add also more value.
00:38:34
Speaker
um for the work. I wish I had delayed that question to end on that because it's such a positive affirming sentiment that we ended up but I did want to ask one other question which is on the actual
Sourcing High-Resolution Images for Books
00:38:48
Speaker
building of the two books because I'm curious about where George you talk about in the introduction, where the images come from. So I'm curious on that process. I think listeners are probably interested as well. Susan, maybe we'll start with you. How did you get the images? What was the process of getting them?
00:39:08
Speaker
you know, high enough resolution from, you know, 200 years ago that they would look good in, you know, a book that is not, A, is not small. Like just, I'm holding up for the listeners, like, this is not a small book, right? So like, you can't just pretend, oh, it'll be in a small book and it'll be okay, because you can't really see it. But like, these are all, both of these are high resolution images. So what was that process like for you and how did that come about?
00:39:35
Speaker
It's interesting on the one hand, because Willard was such a bestselling author. So the estimate is by the end of her life, there were a million copies of her publications in circulation. So you can get really inexpensively copies of her textbooks. On the other hand, one of the most thrilling things is that during the process of research, I found an unknown
00:40:00
Speaker
variation of her Temple of Time for English history that was, had been lost to history. So we found it in the library company, Philadelphia, thanks to lots of archivists and map dealers who help us kind of on a treasure hunt and trying to figure out where it might be. So there's really rare material and really common material.
00:40:19
Speaker
Your main question, though, is how do you get such wonderful resolution? We have all the credit to these archives, principally the David Rumsey collection at Stanford. So David Rumsey shares RJ and my passion for Willard.
00:40:34
Speaker
and for data graphics generally. And so they've done such incredible work over the years in digitizing her work. But also we drew materials from the American Antiquarian Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, like I mentioned. The Emma Willard School supplied some interior shots of her.
00:40:55
Speaker
of her school, which were really helpful as we tried to reconstruct Willard's pedagogy. And then also at the last minute, I give props to people here on the front range. There's some wonderful photographers, both at CU Boulder and University of Denver, who really got us to the finish line with material that we otherwise couldn't find. So for instance, her wonderful
00:41:18
Speaker
textbook on morals for children, which was one of the last things she wrote as she saw the public schools exploding and all these immigrant kids coming in. I wanted to make sure they understood proper morals that she wasn't sure were being taught at home. So I hope that answers your question. Yeah, no, that's great. That's great. A lot of folks helping in different ways. George, what about you? I know there are not millions of copies of various books. It's a little bit of a different process.
00:41:46
Speaker
Oh yes, definitely. You would not be able to find my original for any of these prices. It's a bit of a shame. I actually do have a copy myself, the original. This is, to be clear, a part of
00:42:02
Speaker
maybe two centimeters thicker than the one that you have, but contains all of the different parts. Of course, in French, with some antiquated formulations, so to say. But yeah, so there has been a couple of
00:42:18
Speaker
aspects that I can address. So, for instance, first the images that we took from the original book and then the extra images that we inquired, we added into the book because Maré references them and there is unfortunately no visual in the original Maré and some of them he, of course, reworked.
00:42:41
Speaker
So first for the images, I want to say thanks, first of all, to RJ, because he went about and, well, how do I put this in a nice way? He went about and, of course, opened a second edition of a Marais and flattened it, so to say, to take these images with the help of a photographer with high-resolution files being then used.
00:43:10
Speaker
The first iteration was to look into, you know, these are the crispy details, look into how we can actually improve these images, maybe by using computer vision processing or certain approaches that could help us. For instance, if the book has a bit of yellowing, increase the contrast when we can without taking it too far.
00:43:32
Speaker
Then we went into a second iteration where we focused on, you know, we want to show actually the same equal size graphic as it is present in the original in the printed book, which we ended up successfully doing. And I was doing that yesterday just for the fun of it. Okay, that really looks good. And even better than the original, especially with the better quality paper.
00:43:58
Speaker
And actually, the final part was really going on manually. RJ, myself, through the images and working our way through them.
00:44:12
Speaker
Yeah, so that's basically for the images. On the second part, for the images we referenced, that Mahe also referenced, and we had to hunt down, I think ended up also involving a lot of great folks, like for instance, the David Ramsey map, of course, this is to no surprise, holds the key to beautiful photography and pieces.
00:44:39
Speaker
Also, special thanks to the National Library of France, which we also annoyed with some requests and or about just purchased directly the files which we needed. But along all of this, I think the niceness of all of this process or the
00:45:01
Speaker
The takeaway message is that it was all the time a work in progress and we also came across very beautiful visualizations that we would not have otherwise.
00:45:13
Speaker
Well, it's great. The books are a joy to hold. I'm still a physical book reader, so I appreciate having a beautiful book to hold on to and read. So congrats to both of you. They're great books. I hope folks will read them and think about all the things that we've talked about today. So thanks, Susan and George. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Great to chat with you.
00:45:37
Speaker
Thanks, John. Can we also just give one shout out to the art director, Lorenzo Fanton? Yes. Okay, so tell me, okay, so now everyone's like, wait, the show is over. Okay, so tell me a little bit about...
00:45:53
Speaker
Sorry. How that, because this is beyond, this is beyond my experience. So how does, so how does that work at the end? Because these are my experience of publishing books is you send the manuscript over to the publisher and then they deal with it and send you some proofs and then whatever. But this, this is much more hands-on for both of you. So what was Lauren, what was the process with Lorenzo like? I didn't, I was on a call once or twice with him as we tried to think about both the big picture
00:46:22
Speaker
that we were trying to create like sort of aesthetically but also details but my understanding is that RJ was deep in the weeds with Lorenzo to the extent that Lorenzo was in Italy overseeing the printing and that there were different iterations of the of the images where he said the color's not right. That's correct. And making sure that they went back to the drawing board so that's my understanding. Go ahead, George. Yes, exactly. Just wanted to also echo the mention of Lorenzo because
00:46:51
Speaker
He did a fantastic job. And as far as I remember as well, from RJ and from the feedback that I received and from getting in the call once with Lorenzo, he was really meticulous, had a lot of attention on the details, whether the pages are bleeding correctly, is there everything actually being cut correctly? Are the colors correct? So all of these aspects completely overwhelming.
00:47:20
Speaker
And I think big kudos and shout out to him. Yeah, because there are several spreads in both books that span two facing pages. And so they are, I'll hold this up for us, for the YouTube watchers, like this map in the Moray book, it's not like
00:47:42
Speaker
an image on the left side and a separate image on the right side. They come together as a single image. And then in the Willard book, there's a poster at the end. I don't know how many people know. It's kind of tucked in there on the last, on the inside cover at the end. There's a little poster there. So that's a little.
00:47:57
Speaker
I don't know, maybe that's an Easter egg. To your question about production, that's why the book, it actually comes with a sheet of instructions, which is this is a book that's been sewn, not glued. And so this is how you relax the pages. And I was so impressed by the level of care that both of them put into this.
00:48:18
Speaker
work of art, which is, I don't know about you, Georges, but when people see it, even before they read it, they just sort of marvel at the quality which they haven't held a book like this maybe a long time before. Exactly.
00:48:36
Speaker
Yes, I can only just give one more detail. All those listening interested and have not yet bought the books, either one of them or all of them,
00:48:53
Speaker
you should know that even the books was designed for the books. This is how, to what extent this has been in the works and how it has been prepared. So yeah, it has been done with great care and I think there's a lot of time, effort, passion that we also put into the books that actually completely goes across the board for all those that participated.
00:49:22
Speaker
Yeah. Well, kudos to RJ Lorenzo, all these different folks that you have relied on for all these different pieces. And I'll put links to all these institutions and places on the show notes so people can check them out. And of course, to both of you, congrats on these books. They're great. And again, now we can finish off. Now I'll say thanks again. Thanks again for coming on the show. I appreciate it. Thank you, John. Thank you, John.
00:49:51
Speaker
And thanks to everyone for tuning into this week's episode of the show. I just want to let you know that my book, Data Visualization in Excel, is set to launch at the end of this week. It comes out on May 26th. I hope you consider picking up a copy. If you work in Excel, my book will help you create better, more effective, and different visualizations, helping you move beyond that standard Excel insert chart menu to create a whole range of different and more exciting charts.
00:50:19
Speaker
So I hope you will continue to listen to the show. I hope you'll rate and review the show wherever you receive and listen to your podcasts. But I hope you'll just enjoy this episode and more to come. So until next time, this has been the policy of this podcast. Thanks so much for listening.
00:50:35
Speaker
A number of people help bring you the PolicyViz podcast. Music is provided by the NRIs. Audio editing is provided by Ken Skaggs. Design and promotion is created with assistance from Sharon Satsuki-Ramirez. And each episode is transcribed by Jenny Transcription Services. If you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it and review it on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:50:57
Speaker
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