The handmade beauty of Machine Age data visualizations

The handmade beauty of Machine Age data visualizations

How William James, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Francis Galton thought with diagrams

I spent last week at Harvard doing research in the archives of William James, the psychologist, philosopher, psychical researcher, brother of Henry James, and all around interesting person. He was a brilliant, charming, self-defeating, deeply strange man (exhibit A: he believed taking a high dose of nitrous oxide helped him finally understand Hegel). That mixture of qualities comes across vividly in his papers.

What doesn’t, at least at first, is that he was a talented visual artist. In fact, before he became a psychologist, William James dreamed of being a professional painter. He studied for several years in his late teens and early twenties under the painter William Morris Hunt.

Although none of William’s paintings appear to survive, a careful reader of his archive will find evidence that he continued to draw throughout his life.

Here he is, for instance, doodling on an envelope addressed to him from Geneva:

Readers of *The Metaphysical Club, *Louis Menand’s wonderful book about James and his circle, will recognize the image below as William’s sensitive drawing of his brother Wilkie while he was recovering from being shot during the Civil War.

The visual creativity of James is not just a clue about how his own mind worked. It’s also part of a larger shift in the culture of science during his generation: in the nineteenth century, design and the nascent world of big data came together, for the first time, to create the modern concept of data visualization.

Although James and his collaborators are rarely mentioned in discussions of the origins of data visualization, they actually played a very important role in shaping it. They were the consolidators and extenders of a new paradigm — the generation *after *the famous names in the field like William Playfair and Florence Nightingale.

The generation of William James came into adulthood in the Machine Age of the 1870s, ‘80s and ‘90s. Information buffeted the human brain like never before. And the new technique of data visualization pushed into new domains: the mapping of the mind, the sociology of race, and the pursuit of explicit political ends.

James is famous among historians of science for what Francesca Bordogna calls “boundary work” — he moves across disciplines and fields with a manic, restless energy that makes it hard to figure out exactly what he was.

As we’ll see, this included an unusual approach to visualizing mental activity that yielded significant firsts, including the first schematic of a neural network. Along the way, James also had important relationships with two pioneers of modern data visualization who are rarely put in the same sentence: Francis Galton and W.E.B. du Bois.

Francis Galton (center) was a sort of intellectual frenemy for James, initially a mentor and influence, then later — in his guise as a founder of eugenics and ardent imperialist — as an exemplar of the dangers of scientific hubris. Du Bois (pictured at right) studied with James at Harvard and was deeply influenced by his philosophy of pluralism.

What they shared is a conviction that drawing, diagramming, and composing images was not a decorative step added after the thinking was done. It was how the thinking got done. This seems to me a crucial point in light of new AI tools like Claude Design, which automates the design process (on which more below).

Quite a few people have pointed out that writing is a form of thought (my favorite entry in this genre is this 2025 essay by Derek Thompson). But it’s worth thinking more about what *else *counts as thinking too — specifically, the sorts of important, creative thinking we don’t want to accidentally mislabel as “drudgery that we are happy to let AI take over for us.”

Design, I would argue, is not drudgery.

The images below also remind us how *handmade *data visualization once was. W.E.B. du Bois’s visualizations from the 1900 World’s Fair are rightfully famous online, and they look great as compressed jpgs shared on social media. But it’s important to remember that these are large, hand-drawn, hand-lettered posters. These are not just the product of mental work but manual work, too.

That link between the hand and mind is harder to come by in a world where all research is digital, but it can be fun and important to access when doing serious research. When I was deepest in researching the history of 20th century psychedelic science for Tripping on Utopia, I filled up a yellow notebook with collaged images and primary source snippets from my archival research. I started it as a sideline, almost a hobby to distract me from what I saw as the “real” work of actually writing the book.

It turned out to be one of the most significant forms of research I did, precisely because it was so freeform and undirected. I started noticing links between different documents, and thinking more deeply about the motives (public, private, and even subconscious) of the people I was writing about.

The rest of this post is a gallery of some of the ways that James, Galton, and Du Bois visualized data along with some desultory commentary. I end by experimenting a bit with Claude Design to see what gets lost when we automate this type of exploratory visual thinking with data.

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William James

You’d be hard-pressed to find any reference to James in books about the history of data visualizations or design. But I think he deserves a page or two. For one thing, his Principles of Psychology (1890) contains what I believe to be the earliest ever visual representation of a neural network:

The most interesting data visualization in James’s work is this however, IMO:

James intends the image above as a representation of how consciousness “moves through” the process of uttering of a simple sentence over time. The numbers on one axis are showing moments in time, and the other axis shows the words being said or thought. The Joy Division-esque crest running through the middle is the changing attention we pay to each word over time.

It is really striking to me how much this looks like a computer rendering — but it’s from 1890! For this attempt at a sort of faux-four-dimensional modeling of thought, plus the neural network chart alone, I think James deserves a lot of credit for his data visualization.

There are other interesting images in *Principles of Psychology, *especially in chapter two which you can read here, although they are a bit more familiar.

For instance, here is a schematic of how a child perceives a candle flame:

And an early attempt to map which parts of the brain correspond to specific body regions and sensations:

Francis Galton

James read Galton closely, and cited him throughout Principles of Psychology — especially on questions of mental imagery and visual perception. Galton’s famous “breakfast-table questionnaire,” which asked hundreds of correspondents to describe how vividly they could picture the objects on their breakfast table that morning, was one of the first systematic attempts to gather data on subjective visual experience at scale. James was fascinated by it. He replicated versions of Galton’s mental-imagery surveys in his own classes and used the results in his writing.

Galton was also a pioneer of meteorology and produced many, many beautiful charts relating to weather phenomena — things like this:

But the visualization that appears to have most interested James (and which I find most striking too) is this jam-packed color plate about mental imagery and synesthesia which comes at the end of Galton’s book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (1883):

The big idea that linked Galton and James was not just that inner life could be represented as data, but that this data could be rendered as pictures.

Galton, obsessed as he was by m