Orit Halpern. Beautiful Data

How has a rhetoric of “beautiful” (elegant in the mathematical sense as well as the graphical) data come to have potent ideological force in the last sixty years? Orit Halpern suggests that aestheticization has played a crucial role in legitimizing data visualization and graphical modes of reasoning since 1945. She argues that technological transformations have changed vision research as artificial intelligence altered our conception of bodies, brains, and the management of culture. She attributes these changes in part to the proliferation of intellectual activity built on diagrammatic and schematic visualization across a wide variety of disciplines (cybernetics, design and systems theory, computational processes, and statistical thinking). Halpern selects an array of figures in city planning, government data management, and other activities to consider the general shift in the relationship between the terms “vision and reason” in her subtitle. The examples are indisputably significant. Charles and Ray Eames were crucial to mid-twentieth-century design (broadly understood as a set of analytic principles, not merely implementation techniques). Their canonical works are still cited as approaches to thinking about issues of scale, pattern, project, and form. They extended the early-twentieth-century formalist “language” of graphics (with their roots in abstract art and later applied aesthetics epitomized by the Bauhaus curriculum in the 1920s and 1930s) into broad theoretical and practical application. Norbert Wiener’s wartime research in cybernetics had a widespread impact on the development of feedback mechanisms integral to “smart” systems in many domains. In the 1940s, Warren S. McCulloch and Walter Pitts engineered the first experiments in neural networks, which were meant to bootstrap responses in electrical circuits into emergent capacities. In second-order cybernetics their work has been incorporated into the design of complex systems. These figures contributed research that combined new models of intelligence with engineering capacities augmented by computational systems to produce the systems that are an integral part of constructing (intellectually as well as literally) our contemporary world.

Cognitive science · Cybernetics · Diagrammatic reasoning · Epistemology · Graphics · Ideology · Politics · Sociology · Variety (cybernetics) · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History of Science and Medicine · Law · Philosophy · Psychology