​​This Visualization Called My Back: Mediating Information Across the Spectrum in the 1980s

Two parallel but related breakthroughs in publishing occurred in the spring of 1983. In one, Gloria Anzaldúa, an unemployed writer and teacher living in the Bronx, and Cherrie Moraga, a former waitress with a degree in feminist writing, re-issued their jointly edited anthology of essays, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, with the Kitchen Table Press. This new press, which Moraga herself had co-founded two years earlier in response to the dearth of publishing opportunities for women of color writers, allowed them to completely redesign this second edition so that it included illustrations and visualizations. Meanwhile, in Cheshire, Connecticut, a young adjunct professor of statistics at Princeton University was bridging a gap of his own, one similarly related to vision and visualization. His illustrated book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information had been delayed—not because of a lack of representation for his writerly voice, but because he could not find a publisher who could include his wide variety of tables, charts, and illustrated data visualizations dating from the 11th century to the present. Tufte took out a loan to produce it in his garage, and his own field-changing book was the result, one that gave him “fresh new eyes for the intellectual and aesthetic joy of visual evidence, visual reasoning, and visual understanding.” This paper examines these concurrent shifts in publishing as constituting a radical, emergent moment for creative visualizations: one that imagined anew the printing apparatus as a tactile partner for contemporary data.