Timing History : The Introduction of Graphical Analysis in 19th century British Economics

Maas, Harro; Morgan, Mary S.

doi:10.3917/rhsh.007.0097

Cited by 32 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…6 In our contemporary social science and public usage, a table is normally read downwards with time, which may account for the fact that when social scientists began to adopt graphs as a mode of representation for phenomena in historical time around the third quarter of the nineteenth century, time was often on the vertical axis. Conventions here were only settled in the last quarter of the nineteenth century within a history of serious discussion of such methods (see Maas and Morgan 2002). The convention that historical time is visualised left to right on an historical graph may be associated with direction of text reading; there is some evidence that in societies where text is read right to left, it seems more natural to read time in that direction too (see Tversky, 2004).…”

Section: Inducing Visibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Inducing Visibility and Visual Deduction

Morgan

2020

East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Jo

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Scientists use diagrams not just to visualize objects and relations in their fields, both empirical and theoretical, but to reason with them as tools of their science. While the two dimensional space of diagrams might seem restrictive, scientific diagrams can depict many more than two elements, can be used to visualize the same materials in myriad different ways, and can be constructed in a considerable variety of forms. This article takes up two generic puzzles about 2D visualizations. First, How do scientists in different communities use 2D spaces to depict materials that are not fundamentally spatial? This prompts the distinction between diagrams that operate in different kinds of spaces: real, ideal, and artificial. And second, How do diagrams, in these different usages of 2D space, support various kinds of visual reasoning that cross over between inductive and deductive? The argument links the representational form and content of a diagram (its vocabulary and grammar) with the kinds of inferential and manipulative reasoning that are afforded, and constrained, by scientists’ different usages of 2D space.

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Section: Inducing Visibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Inducing Visibility and Visual Deduction

Morgan

2020

East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Jo

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“…Mathematics and logic fall within the realm of analytic knowledge, in this view: their claims are devoid of empirical content and merely record the conventions regulating the rigorous use of century, in conjunction with the discrediting of William Playfair's work. Maas and Morgan (2002) connect the resurfacing of graphical methods in British political economy at the end of the nineteenth century to a broader shift in attitudes toward history and statistics -I will return to their work later on in this section. symbolic formalism.…”

Section: The Eclipse Of Diagrams?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward an Integrated History and Philosophy of Diagrammatic Practices

Ambrosio

2020

East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Jo

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This article offers an overview of current approaches to the study of diagrams and their roles in scientific knowledge making. The discussion develops in three parts. The first investigates and questions historical and philosophical analyses of the suppression of diagrams in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It attempts to sketch an alternative historiography of diagrammatic practices in which the insights of advocates of diagrammatic reasoning in a time of “objectivity without images” take center stage. The second part turns to the American philosopher, scientist, and logician Charles Sanders Peirce as a representative defender of diagrammatic reasoning and diagrammatic representation in the late nineteenth century, and it investigates his legacy on current approaches to diagrams. The final part exposes a puzzling paradox in the literature, characterizing it as a false dichotomy between “the representational view” and the “object-based view” of diagrams. The article concludes that this dichotomy reveals more about the identities of scholars embracing particular disciplinary traditions than about diagrams themselves, and it suggests that this can be overcome by attending to diagramming as a practice at the intersections of representation, manipulation, and experimentation.

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“…In the latter nineteenth century, a few economists began to use graphs and tables of statistical data to provide empirical support for their arguments, or to describe behavioral characteristics of economic phenomena (Klein, 1997;Maas and Morgan, 2002). They were quick to take up certain statistical techniques developed for biometrics, namely correlation and regression (Aldrich, 2010).…”

Section: The Development Eramentioning

confidence: 99%