Reverse Engineering “The Shape of History”

Lauren Klein’s “The Shape of History” sets out to redefine the passive role that users have with data visualizations. Instead of information readily to be consumed, “The Shape of History” is Klein’s modern take on Elizabeth Peabody’s visualization philosophy that emphasized user interaction and personal interpretation.

Source

Klein’s main source came directly from the pages of Elizabeth Peabody’s Universal History: Arranged to Illustrate Bem’s Charts of Chronology, currently located at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. In addition to the textbook, Peabody sold a workbook with blank charts for students to cross-reference and color in events accordingly in her colored grid system. Here pictured is the original table of contents and chart found in the text:

 

 

 

 

 

 

The intent was to convert the dates and historical event to color-coded grids in graphical form. Below is an example of a student’s work:

 

Process

Now translating this in a more modern, accessible sense, Klein created a website and assembled the information and exercise to be online. Looking through her Github, we see that the historical events was compiled into a dataset in CSV form. The graphical grids found in the exercises of the textbook and the interactivity that comes along with it were created using markup and programming languages such as HTML5, CSS and JavaScript.

Presentation

By far my favorite part, I loved how Klein parallels Peabody’s exercise by formatting the website into a grid system as well. It’s arranged in a 3 by 5 grid, in which the current individual, information grid scales to the browser’s size. After a few grids of information, sheincludes four interactive modes: explore, learn, play, and compare.

She includes the same interactivity intended in the original exercises from highlighting events by text in the table of contents and their graphical forms to providing a grid to create the user’s own events using the same formatting. I particularly enjoyed the comparison of different data representations from their CSV form, their graphical form, to a timeline and table of contents form. 

 

In conclusion, I found this reinterpretation of data visualization to be very insightful and useful in its own sense. Despite requiring more effort on the user’s part, the extra step forces the user to process the information in their mind to make actual sense of what they’re consuming. With how easily accessible and how much information is made available to us, we’ve become almost desensitized to the point where data easily comes and goes in our mind. This method allows for users to digest the information and to make connections and data more meaningful, rather than just mindless consumption.