TY - JOUR
T1 - Users Gone Astray
T2 - Spreadsheet Charts, Junky Graphics, and Statistical Knowledge
AU - Jones, Matthew L.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 History of Science Society. All rights reserved.
PY - 2023
Y1 - 2023
N2 - This story, which begins from the widely deplored look of the graphing in Microsoft’s spreadsheet program, Excel, and extends back some seventy-five years, is about code that enables users to create visualizations without enough craft-at least in the eyes of their critics. It investigates two facets of data visualization since World War II: iterative analysis through graphical means and the making of business charts concerning numerical data. These two efforts automate some human skills. Both are seen as aberrant, dangerous, and in bad taste when they become too automatic, as users fail to reflect upon defaults. Both activities challenge the binary division between a “nonalgorithmic” culture of human judgments and a contemporary world subjected to hard, unaccountable logics. Telling a story of everyday cultures deemed to have gone bad, this article offers a history of envisioned users shaped through tools that could amplify virtues-and also vices-in thinking, depicting, and acting.
AB - This story, which begins from the widely deplored look of the graphing in Microsoft’s spreadsheet program, Excel, and extends back some seventy-five years, is about code that enables users to create visualizations without enough craft-at least in the eyes of their critics. It investigates two facets of data visualization since World War II: iterative analysis through graphical means and the making of business charts concerning numerical data. These two efforts automate some human skills. Both are seen as aberrant, dangerous, and in bad taste when they become too automatic, as users fail to reflect upon defaults. Both activities challenge the binary division between a “nonalgorithmic” culture of human judgments and a contemporary world subjected to hard, unaccountable logics. Telling a story of everyday cultures deemed to have gone bad, this article offers a history of envisioned users shaped through tools that could amplify virtues-and also vices-in thinking, depicting, and acting.
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U2 - 10.1086/725133
DO - 10.1086/725133
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85174302456
SN - 0369-7827
VL - 38
SP - 185
EP - 204
JO - Osiris
JF - Osiris
IS - 1
ER -