Mathematics for “Just Plain Folks”: The Viennese Tradition of Visualization of Quantitative Information and its Verbal Forms, 1899-1914 (graphics accompanying presentation)

Dalbello, Marija (2006) Mathematics for “Just Plain Folks”: The Viennese Tradition of Visualization of Quantitative Information and its Verbal Forms, 1899-1914 (graphics accompanying presentation) .

Abstract

This handout accompanies a podcast of invited presentation given at the University of Arizona, School of Information Resources and Library Service Brown Bag History & Philosophy of Information Research Series (Tucson, AZ, October 11, 2006). The talk focused on visual statistics from the turn of the nineteenth and the twentieth century. These popular forms of quantitative argumentation are examined from the point of view of the involvement of print industry in the shaping of and dissemination of public policy and the discourse of rational management and the modern state in the Habsburg empire on the eve of its dissolution. EXTENDED ABSTRACT: Statistical representations in the popular almanacs published at the end of the nineteenth century in the Habsburg Empire are an early prototype of visualizing statistical data for popular consumption and informing the public of an ethnically and linguistically differentiated society. These naturalistic and culturally rich visualizations enabled ordinary citizens to acquire knowledge – using simple visual reasoning skills, reliance on mental models and narrative conventions. The visualization of statistics is accompanied by verbalization, which presents a parallel mode of quantitative reasoning. These verbalizations exemplify the language of practical mathematics: the problem is generated in relation to the setting and located in everyday activities of the lived-in world of the implied viewers. The presentation will focus on these verbalizations of visual statistics, combining cognitive approach with historical and cultural interpretation to examine how rhetorical forms attached to practical mathematical reasoning can be related to cognition as socially situated activity. The connection of verbalizations to visual sense-making in these early statistical representations for popular consumption exemplify the construction of the concept of “information” in modernity and explore the effects on the visual regime represented by statistical information of older verbal forms of quantitative reasoning.